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

by Siddhartha Mukherjee

what if a virus has taken residence within a cell? What about, say, a flu virus that has infiltrated the cell and hijacked its protein-making apparatus in order to churn out viral proteins that are indistinguishable from the cell’s own? This is what viruses do: they “go native.” A flu virus turns its hostage into a veritable flu factory, producing thousands of virions per hour. And because antibodies cannot enter cells, how are they to identify one of these rogue cells masquerading as a normal cell? What, then, prevents any virus from using every cell in our body as a perfect microbial sanctuary? The answers to all these questions, I would soon find out, lay in the cell whose seductive song had tugged me all the way from California to Alain Townsend’s lab at Oxford; the cell that could, with nearly miraculous sensitivity, discern a virus-infected cell from an uninfected one, and the cell that can discriminate the self from the nonself. The subtle, wise, discerning T cell.