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

by Siddhartha Mukherjee

In 1665, nearly a decade before Leeuwenhoek published his letter describing animalcules in water, Robert Hooke, an English scientist and polymath, had also seen cells—although not live ones, and nowhere as diverse as Leeuwenhoek’s animalcules. As a scientist, Hooke, perhaps, was quite the opposite of Leeuwenhoek. He had been educated at Wadham College in Oxford, and his intellect ranged widely, foraging through different worlds of science and consuming whole realms as he moved. Hooke was not just a physicist but also an architect, a mathematician, a telescopist, a scientific illustrator, and a microscopist. Unlike most gentleman scientists of his era—men from wealthy families who could afford to ruminate about the natural sciences without ruing the next paycheck—Hooke came from an indigent English family. As a scholarship student at Oxford, he had survived by apprenticing with the eminent physicist Robert Boyle. By 1662, even as Boyle’s subordinate, he had established himself as a powerfully independent thinker and found employment