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

by Siddhartha Mukherjee

Long before the birth of cell biology, Aristotle imagined the self as the core of being; a unity of the body and the soul. The physical boundary of the self, he proposed, was defined by the body and its anatomy. But the totality of the self was a unity of that physical vessel with a metaphysical entity that occupied it—the body filled by the soul. In principle, Aristotle, too, might have fretted about the possible invasion of the physical vessel by a foreign soul—indeed, “possession” was frequently used by psychics to explain mental and behavioral breakdowns—but he didn’t seem to sweat the question: once the physical vessel had been occupied by one soul, its potential invasion by—or fusion with—another soul didn’t bother him. In quite the opposite sense, some Vedic philosophers in India, writing between the fifth and second century BC, welcomed the erasure of the individual self and its fusion with the universal. They rejected the Greek dualism between the body and the soul—and, indeed, between an individual body and the cosmic soul. They termed the self atman. (There are many other Sanskrit words for the self besides atman, but it is the one that holds the most meaning.) The universal, multitudinous self, in contrast, was the Brahman. For these philosophers, the self was an ideal fusion of atman and Brahman, or perhaps more accurately, the seamless flow of the universal self through the individual self. However, this fusion/flow was reserved as a goal for spiritual attain...