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April 27 - May 13, 2025
A life within a life. An independent living being—a unit—that forms a part of the whole. A living building block contained within the larger living being.
The acuity of their insight was in the proposition that a deep unity of organization and function ran through living beings.
It is one thing to encounter a cancer, it is quite another to bear witness to its mobility.
Cancer, in short, is cell biology visualized in a pathological mirror.
Our vulnerabilities are built out of the vulnerabilities of cells.
We were pixelated assemblages, composites, our existence the result of a cooperative agglomeration.
begs a deeper question: What is “life”? It may be one of biology’s metaphysical conundrums that we are still struggling to define the very thing that defines us.
In a sense, then, one might define life as having cells, and cells as having life.
we need the story of the cell to tell the story of life and of our selves.
A cell brings materiality and physicality to a set of genes. A cell enlivens genes.
made for telescopes, then foggy, dark England seemed custom-made for microscopes)—
trained as an immunologist at first, then a stem cell scientist, and, finally, a cancer biologist before I became a medical oncologist.* Emily embodied all these past lives—not just mine, but, more importantly, the lives and labors of thousands of researchers, looking down thousands of microscopes, over thousands of days and nights.
The organization is cellular, if you will.
True knowledge is to be aware of one’s ignorance.
“A Life Full of Work and Toil Is Not a Burden but a Benediction,”
Fewer facts are placed before the spectators in that tumult than a butcher could teach a doctor in his meat market.”
hundred such scopes, each a marvel
It looked as much like a modern microscope as a bullock cart resembles, say, a spaceship.
Hooke got an ant drunk on brandy so that he could sketch a detailed image of its antlers.
claiming dominion over critical parts of a science, but never asserting complete authority over any one subject.
“Life is, in general, cell activity. Beginning with the use of the microscope in the study of the organic world, far-reaching studies […] have shown that all plants and animals are, in the beginning […] a cell within which other cells develop to give rise again to new cells that together, undergo transformation to new forms, and, finally … constitute the amazing organism.”
“Every disease depends on an alteration of a larger or smaller number of cellular units in the living body, every pathological disturbance, every therapeutic effect, finds its ultimate explanation only when it’s possible to designate the specific living cellular elements involved.”
Every cell, he continued, “has its own special action, even though it derive[s] its stimulus from other parts.”
isn’t sufficient to locate a disease in an organ; it’s necessary to understand which cells of the organ are responsible.
“Every pathological disturbance, every therapeutic effect, finds its ultimate explanation only when it’s possible to designate the specific living cellular elements involved.”
asserting “their presence only by their absence”—
Without an edge, there is no self.
The membrane presents a locus of paradoxes.
It is yet another of life’s fascinating recursions, in which proteins make it possible to make other proteins.
structural similarities between
mitochondria and bacteria but also their molecular and genetic commonalities.
‘Now, my suspicion is that the universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose.
it’s because we’ve forgotten, as we often do, the spine-tingling awe that each of these discoveries generated in its time.
Sight—real sight—requires insight.
That sentence may be one of the pivotal understatements in the history of science.
What began as a treatment for human infertility is now being repurposed as a therapy for human vulnerability.
It is as if the drive to become multicellular was so forceful and pervasive that evolution leapt over the fence again and again.
multicellular cluster acquires an evolutionary edge.
In the end, the master maker of the embryo is trapped inside the bony prison of the very creature it has created.
The name given to the protein—hemoglobin—was just a bland restatement of its cellular location. A glob in blood.
(It is tempting to speculate that his relationship with the scientific establishment was its own perpetual Kampf.)
Incited by an infection, the cells mature from the bone marrow and flood into blood vessels, hot for combat, their faces granulated, their nuclei dilated—a fleet of teenage soldiers
deployed to battle.
We—multicellular animals—have been at war with microbes for such a long time in evolutionary history that, like ancient, conjoined enemies, we’ve been defined by each other.
The substance bound by the antibody—the toxin or the foreign protein—was soon termed an antigen: a substance that generates an antibody.
The locus of immunological memory, in summary, is not a protein that persists, as Ehrlich may have imagined. It is a B cell, previously stimulated, that bears the memory of the prior exposure.
How did they even think of using the undead to resuscitate the dying?
“One hears the phrase ‘fight with cancer,’ but this description is a pale shadow of the intense, personal, grinding immunological battle he waged with the rebellious cells that challenged him.
Sometimes human mysteries are deeper than medical ones.
the Cain of inflammation conjoined with the Abel of tolerance.
