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

by Siddhartha Mukherjee

The room was so dimly lit that it was not even necessary to pull down the curtains—the city of Oxford was always dimly lit (if cloudless Italy was a land made for telescopes, then foggy, dark England seemed custom-made for microscopes)—and

Cell biology, too, was instigated by an unassuming, practical technology. Highbrow science was born from lowbrow tinkering.

“Early Stages of Fertilization in Vitro of Human Oocytes Matured in Vitro,” was published in the journal Nature in 1969. Unfortunately, Jean Purdy, who had performed the experiment, was not credited, consistent with the conventional practice of cutting women out of science.

perhaps the most astonishing feature of multicellularity is that it evolved independently, and in multiple different species, not just once, but many, many times.

“at a certain stage there emerges a single cell which will have as all its progeny the human brain. The mere existence of that cell should be one of the great astonishments of the earth.”

perhaps a history of cell biology can be written through the lens of the history of glass.)

The purpose of a cell in a multicellular organism, though, is not to be alone, or to live alone; it is to serve the needs of the organism.

early experiments to transfuse blood into humans ranged from the macabre to the mad.

“War has never lavished gifts on humanity; an exception may be made for the impetus and popularization of the use of blood and plasma… attributable to the Spanish Civil War, World War II, and the Korean conflict.”

transfusion and banking—cellular therapy—stands as the most significant medical legacy of the war.

“[E]very immunologist’s pulse will race as he or she sees the three-dimensional structure of the binding site of an MHC molecule displayed for the first time,” he wrote in the pages of Nature, because it will explain the “structural basis” of antigen recognition.

Conscripted to the medical corps during World War I, he became so disgusted with the carnage and disillusioned by the war that he shot himself in the arm, claimed to have been injured by enemy gunfire, and was therefore able to resume his scientific and medical studies.

It is one of Cajal’s legacies that he never performed a single experiment in cell biology—or at least an experiment in the traditional sense. To see his drawings of neurons is to realize how much can be learned by just seeing.

The war interrupted Hodgkin and Huxley’s collaboration for nearly seven years. Hodgkin, the engineer-tinker, was sent off to make oxygen masks and radars for pilots; Huxley, the mathematician, was deployed to use equations to make machine guns more accurate.

Otto Loewi,

dreamed of an experiment.

“I awoke” he wrote, “turned on the light and jotted down a few notes on a tiny slip of thin paper. Then I fell asleep again. It occurred to me at 6.00 o’clock in the morning that during the night I had written down something important, but I was unable to decipher the scrawl. The next night, at 3.00 o’clock, the idea returned. It was the design of an experiment

the hypothesis of chemical transmission that I had uttered seventeen years ago was correct. I got up immediately, went to the laboratory, and performed a simple experiment on a frog heart according to the nocturnal design.”

The discovery of the function of pancreatic cells began, inauspiciously, with a quarrel between two anatomists that ended in a murder.

Goaded into confidence by some combination of anxiety and intrigue,

there’s a second kind of joy in science: the peculiar exhilaration of being precisely wrong. It is an equal and opposite sensation of joy: when an experiment proves a hypothesis wrong, and the truth turns, as if on a pivot, to point exactly in the opposite direction.

Or why, as Helen Mayberg told me, the patients who describe their depression as an “existential ennui” (her words) typically do not respond to deep brain stimulation, while those that describe themselves as “falling into vertical holes” often do.