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

by Siddhartha Mukherjee

In his 2021 book on ecology and climate, The Nutmeg’s Curse: Parables for a Planet in Crisis, Amitav Ghosh recounts the story of an eminent professor of botany who accompanies a young man from a local village to guide him through a rain forest. The young man is able to identify each of the various plant species. His acumen stuns the professor, who compliments him on his knowledge. But the man is dejected. He “nods and replies with downcast eyes. ‘Yes, I’ve learned the names of all the bushes, but I’ve yet to learn the songs.’ ” Many readers might read the word song as metaphorical. But in my reading, it’s far from a metaphor. What the young man laments is that he hasn’t learned the interconnectedness of the individual inhabitants of the rain forest—their ecology, interdependence—how the forest acts and lives as a whole. A “song” can be both an internal message—a hum—and, equally, an external one: a message sent out from one being to another to signal interconnectedness and cooperativity (songs are often sung together, or to one another). We can name cells, and even systems of cells, but we are yet to learn the songs of cell biology.