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

by Siddhartha Mukherjee

A variant of postmodern scientific thought threw the equations, with the blackboards they were written on, into the trash; the baby went with the bathwater. But that, too, is an equal and opposite nonsense: a Newtonian ball thrown into Newtonian space does follow Newtonian laws. The laws that govern the ball are as real and tangible as they were during the conception of the universe. By the same logic, a cell, and a gene, are real. It’s just that they aren’t “real” in isolation. They are fundamentally cooperative, integrating units, and together, they build, maintain, and repair organisms. I cannot help you hold both ideas in your head at the same moment. But perhaps some experience with non-Western philosophies might help here: “cooperative” and “unitary”—selfless and self-regarding—are not mutually exclusive ideas. They exist in parallel. Universal principles satisfy us—one equation good—because they satisfy our belief in an ordered universe. But why must “order” be so soldierly, so singular, so unifest (as opposed to manifest)? Perhaps one manifesto for the future of cell biology is to integrate “atomism” and “holism.” Multicellularity evolved, again and again, because cells, while retaining their boundaries, found multiple benefits in citizenship. Perhaps we, too, should begin to move from the one to the many. That, more than any other, is the advantage of understanding cellular systems, and, beyond that, cellular ecosystems.