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

by Siddhartha Mukherjee

The cause of the disease, he concluded, was not just the infectious agent but also decades of political misrule and social neglect.

historical moral, it was that the state and its citizens were reciprocally connected.

And cellular physiology is the basis of normal physiology.

“Life is, in general, cell activity.

“Every pathological disturbance, every therapeutic effect, finds its ultimate explanation only when it’s possible to designate the specific living cellular elements involved.”

microbes need only be concerned with feeding themselves; neither coordination nor cooperation with others is necessary,

growing only as much as they need to fulfill their functions. When they rebel, cancer can break out.

“All life comes from life.”

microbes—single-celled organisms that entered other organisms and caused pathological changes and tissue degeneration.

organism/microbial cell must be found in a diseased individual,

microbial cell must be isolated and cultured from the diseased individual;

inoculation of a healthy individual with the cultured microbe must recapitulate the essenti...

must be re-isolated from the inoculated individual and match the ori...

Pasteur insisted that, by repeated culture in the lab, bacterial cells could be weakened in their ability to cause disease,

attenuation was nonsense, as microbes were constant in their pathogenicity.

some microbes can be attenuated, while others are difficult to temper.

Snow had, in essence, partially united three disparate theories and fields of medicine.

from inferred risk to a material substance.

making penicillin a magic bullet against bacterial species that rely on the integrity of their cell walls.

bacteria: single-celled organisms that are surrounded by a cell membrane, lack particular cellular structures found in animal and plant cells, and possess other structures that are unique to them.

humans were just “nice-looking luggage to carry bacteria around the world.”

autonomous, mobile, communicative, and reproductive.

perfectly self-sufficient hermits, but can also cooperate to share resources.

cell is the locus of both normal physiology and pathology.

When these two RNA molecules—template and duplicator—met each other, it was, perhaps, the most important and explosive evolutionary love affair in the history of our living planet.

life has only two principal domains—bacteria and archaea—and eukaryotes (“our” cells) represent a relatively recent sub-branch of archaea. We are, perhaps, life-come-lately, the sawdust left over from the carvings of the two main domains of life.

“unexplained void… the black hole at the heart of biology.”

Over time, epidemiologists would create a broader criteria to determine causality for noninfectious diseases.

first and most fundamental properties of the cell: autonomy, reproduction, and development.I

Give me an organic vesicle [cell] endowed with life, and I will give you back whole of the organized world.

A perfectly sealed cell is a perfectly dead cell.

The lipid bilayer was not uniform or monotonous; it was porous by design.

Protoplasm is the “vital fluid”

cytoskeleton tethers components of the cell together, and is required for the movement of the cell.

Building proteins is one of the cell’s major tasks.

Proteins form enzymes that control the chemical reactions of life. They create structural components of the cell. They are the receptors for signals from the outside. They form pores and channels across the membrane, and the regulators that switch genes on and off in response to stimuli.

Proteins are the workhorses o...

organelles: mini-organs found inside cells.

mitochondria, were found to be the cell’s fuel generators;

they are particularly densely packed in cells that need the most energy or that regulate energy storage,

mitochondria are only split between the two daughter cells. In other words, they have no autonomous life; they can live only within cells.

ATP is the central currency of energy in virtually all living cells.

ER was associated with synthesizing and exporting proteins, which carry out virtually all the work of the cell.

The twinning of two ways of seeing—microscopy and biochemistry—was synergistic.

‘Now, my suspicion is that the universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose. If we appropriately bear in mind that the nucleus may be more complicated than we may have once thought, and yet just may be knowable, then this very belief may empower us and our students and successors to penetrate the subject’s awaiting depths, the next of which now beckon.

There is every reason to believe in this program. So let us be of good cheer.’ ”

a cell’s autonomy lies in its anatomy.

the constancy of the interior environment is the condition of free and independent life,

functional cellular anatomy and physiology announced new loci for disease and therapeutic intervention in the twentieth century.

An organelle can function only in the context of the right cell.