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

by Siddhartha Mukherjee

In the history of biology, there are often valleys of silence that follow the peaks of monumental discoveries. Gregor Mendel’s discovery of the gene in 1865 was followed by what one historian called “one of the strangest silences in the history of science”: genes (or “factors” and “elements,” as Mendel loosely called them) were not mentioned for nearly forty years, before being rediscovered in the early 1900s. In 1720, the London physician Benjamin Marten reasoned that tuberculosis—phthisis, or consumption, as it was then called—was a contagious disease of the respiratory system, likely carried by microscopic organisms. He called the potential contagious elements “wonderfully minute living creatures,” and contagium vivum, or “living contagion.” (Note the word living.) Marten would almost have become the father of modern microbiology had he deepened his medical discoveries, but it would take nearly a century before microbiologists Robert Koch and Louis Pasteur each linked disease and putrefaction to the microbial cell.