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

by Siddhartha Mukherjee

We can explain much about the physical, chemical, and biological worlds through evolutionary agglomerations of atomistic units, but those explanations are straining at their leashes. Genes, by themselves, are strikingly incomplete explanations of the complexities and diversities of organisms; we need to add gene-gene interactions and gene-environment interactions to explain organismal physiology and fates. Decades ahead of her time, the geneticist Barbara McClintock called the genome a “sensitive organ of the cell.” The words organ and sensitive reflected ideas totally foreign to geneticists in the fifties and sixties. Arguing against the atomistic gene-by-gene approach favored by geneticists, McClintock proposed, the genome could only be interpreted as a whole—as a “sensitive organ”—that was responsive to its environment. By that same logic, cells, by themselves, are incomplete explanations for organismal complexities. We need to factor in cell-cell interactions, and cell-environment interactions—ushering in holism in cell biology. We possess rudimentary terms for these interactions—ecologies, sociologies, “interactomes”—but still lack models, equations, and mechanisms to understand them. I return, often, to think of disease as a violation of the social compacts between cells.