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

by Siddhartha Mukherjee

In cell biological terms, then, it might be easier to imagine injury, or aging, for that matter, more abstractly, as a furious battle between a rate of decay and a rate of repair, with each rate unique for every individual cell, and individual organ. In some organs, injury overwhelms repair. In some organs, repair keeps apace with injury. In yet other organs, there’s a delicate equilibrium between one rate and another. The body, in its steady state, seems to be maintained—suspended—in constancy. Don’t just do something, stand there. But standing there, standing still, is not a statis but a frenetically active process. What appears as “stillness”—stasis—is, in fact, a dynamic war between these two competing rates. “At death you break up,” Philip Larkin wrote, “the bits that were you / Start speeding away from each other for ever / With no one to see.” But death isn’t a flying apart of organs. It is the withering grind of injury set against the ecstasy of healing. Tenderness, as Ryan puts it, combatting rot. The central corporals in this pitched battle are cells—cells dying in tissues and organs, and cells regenerating tissues and organs. Return, for a moment, to the notion of homeostasis—the maintenance of a constancy in the internal milieu. We first evoked this idea to understand how the cell maintains its internal fixity. We then used it to understand how a healthy body adjusts to metabolic and environmental changes—salt load, waste disposal, sugar metabolism. We apply it...

Mortal Epistemic