The Song of the Cell: An Exploration of Medicine and the New Human

by Siddhartha Mukherjee

But cancer cells don’t “invent” any of these properties. They don’t build anew, they hijack—or, more accurately, the cells that are fittest for survival, growth, and metasisis are naturally selected. The genes and proteins that cells use to generate the building blocks required for growth are appropriated from the genes and cells that a developing embryo uses to fuel its fierce burst of expansion during the first days of life.

In a little less than two centuries—from the late 1830s, when the scientists Matthias Schleiden and Theodor Schwann proposed that all animal and plant tissues were made of cells, to the spring of Emily’s recovery—a radical concept swept through biology and medicine, touching virtually every aspect of the two sciences, and altering both forever. Complex living organisms were assemblages of tiny, self-contained, self-regulating units—living compartments, if you will, or “living atoms,” as the Dutch microscopist Antonie van Leeuwenhoek called them in 1676. Humans were ecosystems of these living units. We were pixelated assemblages, composites, our existence the result of a cooperative agglomeration.

The first is the use of drugs, chemical substances, or physical stimulation to alter the properties of cells—their interactions with one another, their intercommunication, and their behavior. Antibiotics against germs, chemotherapy and immunotherapy for cancer, and the stimulation of neurons with electrodes to modulate nerve cell circuits in the brain fall in this first category. The second is the transfer of cells from body to body (including back into our own bodies), exemplified by blood transfusions, bone marrow transplantation, and in vitro fertilization (IVF). The third is the use of cells to synthesize a substance—insulin or antibodies—that produces a therapeutic effect on an illness. And most recently, there is a fourth category: the genetic modification of cells, followed by transplantation, to create cells, organs, and bodies endowed with new properties.

In a narrow sense, a cell is an autonomous living unit that acts as a decoding machine for a gene.

As an oncologist, I focus on cells that have gone rogue; cells that have marauded spaces where they should not exist; cells dividing out of control.

In 1543, he published his anatomical works in seven volumes entitled De Humani Corporis Fabrica (The Fabric of the Human Body). The word Fabric in the title was a clue to its texture and purpose: this was the human body treated like physical material, not mystery; made of fabric, not spirit. It was part medical textbook, with nearly seven hundred illustrations, and part scientific treatise, with maps and diagrams that would lay the foundation for human anatomical studies for centuries to come.

Coincidentally, it was published the same year that the Polish astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus would put out his “anatomy of the heavens,” the monumental book The Revolutions (On the Revolutions of Heavenly Spheres), which featured a map of the heliocentric solar system that placed the Earth in orbit and the sun firmly at its center.