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

by Siddhartha Mukherjee

backgrounds. McCulloch—stout, short, hefty—was the scion of an “Old Money Toronto” family, as one biographer described it. He had a lively, wandering intellect: “[h]e thought tangentially, often playing connect the dots.” McCulloch trained in internal medicine at the Toronto General Hospital. He was recruited, briefly, as the head of hematology at the Ontario Cancer Institute in 1957 but found himself bored with the humdrum practice of medicine and soon left to become a full-time researcher. Till, in contrast, was a tall, skinny farmhand from Saskatchewan with a PhD from Yale in biophysics. He had an arrow-like mind, was mathematically inclined, and relentless about details. To McCulloch’s inventive madness, he brought method. There was complementarity, too, in their interests and expertise. Till had trained in radiation physics; he knew how to calibrate radiation and measure its effects on the body (he had been a student of the notoriously exacting Harold Johns, who had worked on the effects of cobalt radiation). McCulloch was a hematologist, with an interest in blood