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

by Siddhartha Mukherjee

More than two years have passed since the man with a cough walked into the Seattle clinic. As I write this, in March 2022, the world has recorded nearly 450 million infections, nearly 6 million deaths (both numbers are likely vast underestimates, given the lack of reliable reporting of testing and deaths from the virus). The contagion has leapt across the globe, leaving virtually no corner untouched. Waves of viral strains bearing new mutations have appeared, some more lethal than others—Alpha, Delta, and now, Omicron. More than sixty vaccines against the virus are undergoing clinical tests. Three have been approved in the United States, nine approved by the World Health Organization (WHO), and several others are still in development. Wealthy nations, with mature health care and delivery systems, have been brought to their knees. The United Kingdom has had more than 160,000 deaths. In the United States, the official number of deaths is 965,000. And the counts of the dead, the sick, the ravaged, the displaced, the bankrupted, the bereaved goes on. And on. I cannot shake the images, or the sounds, of the pandemic. Who can? The orange body bags, piled in bunks, in makeshift morgues. The mass graves in Ecuador. The constant wailing of ambulance sirens outside my hospital, fusing together until all I could hear was a wall of shrieks; the Emergency Room, in the spring of 2021, packed to its brim, with stretchers spilling into the corridors; the patients gasping as they drowned i...