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

by Siddhartha Mukherjee

Cancer, in short, may be a rogue self—but it is, indubitably, a self.

But the foot planted on our head was real. Just when we felt that we knew the cell biology of the immune system, when our confidence had crested, scientist’s heads were pushed into the lower reaches of hell.

For them, Covid infection had unveiled a long-standing, but previously invisible, autoimmune disease—

Medicine, I wrote, isn’t a doctor with a black bag. It’s a complex web of systems and processes. And systems that we had thought were self-regulating and self-correcting, like a human body in good health, turned out to be exquisitely sensitive to turbulence, like the body during critical illness.

The heart, of all organs in the body, epitomizes belonging.

The man at Customs asked me for a small bribe, and I felt like hugging him; I was home.

it was seeing that led to unbelieving.

Carla Shatz,

“Cells that fire together, wire together.”)

The world has to be dreamed before it is seen.

We grow, mostly, by dying.”

The field has gone through its own cyclical mood disorder: hopelessness, followed by ecstatic (and perhaps premature) optimism, then a relapse into despair. Finally, there is renewed but cautious hope again.

In anticipating the invention of the wheel, he has already invented it.

It is one of the defining metabolic crises of the human body—cellular starvation in the presence of plenty.

Stillness. Counting to twelve. “Now we will count to twelve and we will all keep still.” Perhaps the most underrated of our qualities.

Old age is a massacre,” Philip Roth wrote. But in truth it is a maceration—the steady grind of injury upon injury, the unstoppable decline of function into dysfunction, and the inexorable loss of resilience.

You are busy being born the whole first long ascent of life, and then, after some apex, you are busy dying: that’s the logic of the line.

In science, as in fashion, trends are intensely in vogue for a moment, and then discarded the next.

He has a gentle patrician air about him, with a humility acquired from years of failure.

But there’s a second kind of joy in science: the peculiar exhilaration of being precisely wrong.

Osteoarthritis, perhaps, was a disease of stem cell loss.

Osteoarthritis is a degenerative disease that arises from a regenerative disease. It is a flaw in rejuvenative homeostasis.

One of the most unusual conundrums of cell biology is that while the early genesis of organs seems to follow a relatively ordered pattern,* the maintenance and repair of tissues in adulthood seems idiosyncratic and peculiar to the tissue itself.

But standing there, standing still, is not a statis but a frenetically active process. What appears as “stillness”—stasis—is, in fact, a dynamic war between these two competing rates.

Arguing against the atomistic gene-by-gene approach favored by geneticists, McClintock proposed, the genome could only be interpreted as a whole—as a “sensitive organ”—that was responsive to its environment.

The real “raw material” of the human body is not information, but the way that information is enlivened, decoded, transformed, and integrated—i.e., by cells.

“The genomic revolution has induced a kind of moral vertigo,” Sandel writes. But it is the cellular revolution that will actualize this moral vertigo.