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

by Siddhartha Mukherjee

On August 6, 1945, at about eight fifteen in the morning, thirty-one-thousand feet above the Japanese city of Hiroshima, an atomic bomb nicknamed Little Boy was dropped from an American military aircraft, a B-29 bomber nicknamed the Enola Gay. The bomb took about forty-five seconds to descend, and then detonated in midair, nineteen hundred feet above the Shima Surgical Hospital, where nurses and doctors were at work, and patients still in their beds. It released about the energetic equivalent of fifteen kilotons of TNT—about thirty-five thousand car bombs going off at once. A circle of fire, more than four miles in radius, spread out from the epicenter, destroying everything in its wake. The tar on the streets boiled. Glass flowed like liquid. Houses were flicked into oblivion, as if by a giant, incinerating hand. Outside the stone steps of Sumitomo bank, a man or woman who was vaporized instantly left a shadow of herself on the stone that had been blistered white by the conflagration. The waves of death that followed had three crests. About seventy thousand to eighty thousand people—nearly 30 percent of the city’s population—were broiled to death almost instantly. “I was trying to describe the mushroom [cloud], this turbulent mass,” one of the tail gunners of the aircraft wrote: “I saw fires springing up in different places, like flames shooting up on a bed of coals […] it looked like lava or molasses covering the whole city, and it seemed to flow outward into the foothil...

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