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

by Siddhartha Mukherjee

“True knowledge is to be aware of one’s ignorance,”

“The body is a cell state in which every cell is a citizen,” Virchow would write. “Disease is merely the conflict of the citizens of the state brought about by the action of external forces.”

Illness was an equalizer; medicine was not designed to discriminate. “Admission to a hospital must be open to every ill person who stands in need of it,” he wrote, “whether he has money or not, whether he is Jewish or heathen.”

my suspicion is that the universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose.