The Song of the Cell Quotes

“Life’s definition, as it stands now, is akin to a menu. It is not one thing but a series of things, a set of behaviors, a series of processes, not a single property. To be living, an organism must have the capacity to reproduce, to grow, to metabolize, to adapt to stimuli, and to maintain its internal milieu.”
― Siddhartha Mukherjee, The Song of the Cell: An Exploration of Medicine and the New Human

“Unlike an antibody, a gunslinging sheriff itching for a showdown with a gang of molecular criminals in the center of town, a T cell is the gumshoe detective going door to door to look for perpetrators hiding inside.”
― Siddhartha Mukherjee, The Song of the Cell: An Exploration of Medicine and the New Human

“perhaps the most astonishing feature of multicellularity is that it evolved independently, and in multiple different species, not just once, but many, many times. It is as if the drive to become multicellular was so forceful and pervasive that evolution leapt over the fence again and again. Genetic evidence suggests this incontrovertibly. Collective existence—above isolation—was so selectively advantageous that the forces of natural selection gravitated repeatedly toward the collective. The transformation from single cells into multicellularity was, as the evolutionary biologists Richard Grosberg and Richard Strathmann wrote, a “minor major transition.”
― Siddhartha Mukherjee, The Song of the Cell: An Exploration of Medicine and the New Human

“Why, you might ask, do the medical mysteries of the Covid-19 pandemic sit at the center of a book on cell biology? Because cell biology sits at the center of the medical mysteries.”
― Siddhartha Mukherjee, The Song of the Cell: An Exploration of Medicine and the New Human

“Now we will count to twelve and we will all keep still. This one time on the face of the Earth, let’s not speak any language, let’s stop for one second, and not move our arms so much.—Pablo Neruda, “Keeping Still”
― Siddhartha Mukherjee, The Song of the Cell: An Exploration of Medicine and the New Human

“The Brain—is wider than the Sky—For—put them side by side—The one the other will contain With ease—and you—beside—The Brain is deeper than the sea—For—hold them—Blue to Blue—The one the other will absorb—As sponges—Buckets—do——Emily Dickinson, c. 1862”
― Siddhartha Mukherjee, The Song of the Cell: An Exploration of Medicine and the New Human

“Without an edge, there is no self.”
― Siddhartha Mukherjee, The Song of the Cell: An Exploration of Medicine and the New Human

“This, rather, is the story of how the concept of the cell, and our comprehension of cellular physiology, altered medicine, science, biology, social structures, and culture.”
― Siddhartha Mukherjee, The Song of the Cell: An Exploration of Medicine and the New Human

“Theories of vitalism found its richest poetic voice in Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who imagined all of animated nature trembling into existence as this vital force flowed through it, just as a breeze might resonate through a harp and produce music that is irreducible to its mere notes.

Humans weren’t merely an agglomeration of “lifeless”, inorganic chemical reactions, and even if we were made of cells, the cells themselves must also possess these vital fluids.”
― Siddhartha Mukherjee, The Song of the Cell: An Exploration of Medicine and the New Human

“Unorthodox souls receive unorthodox rewards.”
― Siddhartha Mukherjee, The Song of the Cell: An Exploration of Medicine and the New Human

“True knowledge is to be aware of one’s ignorance. —Rudolf Virchow, letter to his father, ca. 1830s”
― Siddhartha Mukherjee, The Song of the Cell: An Exploration of Medicine and the New Human

“using a virus that could glue cells together, they fused the B cell with a cancer cell. I am still awestruck by the idea. How did they even think of using the undead to resuscitate the dying? The result was one of the strangest cells in biology. The plasma cell retained its antibody-secreting property, while the cancer cell conferred its immortality. They called their peculiar cell a hybridoma—a, well, hybrid of hybrid and oma, the suffix of carcinoma. The immortal plasma cell was now capable of perpetually secreting only one kind of antibody. We call this antibody of a single type (in other words, a clone), a monoclonal antibody. Milstein and Köhler’s paper was published in Nature in 1975.”
― Siddhartha Mukherjee, The Song of the Cell: How understanding the cell transformed science and our sense of what it means to live.

“Synaptic pruning is thought to sharpen and reinforce the 'correct' synapses, while removing the weak and unnecessary ones. 'It reinforces an old intuition,' a psychiatrist in Boston told me. 'The secret of learning is the systematic elimination of excess. We grow, mostly, by dying." We are hardwired not to be hardwired, and this anatomical plasticity may be the key to the plasticity of our minds.”
― Siddhartha Mukherjee, The Song of the Cell: An Exploration of Medicine and the New Human

“would introduce “germ theory.” Koch’s major contribution was to formalize the idea of the “cause” of a disease. By defining criteria that qualified as “cause,” Koch brought scientific rigor to medicine.”
― Siddhartha Mukherjee, The Song of the Cell: An Exploration of Medicine and the New Human

“he dismissed the idea that invisible “miasmata” from the air were the cause of rot and human disease. The idea that human diseases could be caused by autonomous, self-propagating, pathogenic cells (i.e., germs) would empower cell theory and bring the theory into intimate contact with medicine.”
― Siddhartha Mukherjee, The Song of the Cell: An Exploration of Medicine and the New Human

“The balance between injury/decay and repair/rejuvenation ultimately results in the integrity or degeneration of an organ.”
― Siddhartha Mukherjee, The Song of the Cell: An Exploration of Medicine and the New Human

“cooperative” and “unitary”—selfless and self-regarding—are not mutually exclusive ideas. They exist in parallel.”
― Siddhartha Mukherjee, The Song of the Cell: An Exploration of Medicine and the New Human

“patients who describe their depression as an “existential ennui” (her words) typically do not respond to deep brain stimulation, while those that describe themselves as “falling into vertical holes” often do.”
― Siddhartha Mukherjee, The Song of the Cell: An Exploration of Medicine and the New Human

“why patients with certain neurodegenerative diseases—Parkinson’s among them—have a markedly lower risk of cancer.”
― Siddhartha Mukherjee, The Song of the Cell: An Exploration of Medicine and the New Human

“why the liver and spleen are the same size, are anatomical neighbors, possess virtually the same flux of blood—and yet one (the liver) is among the most frequent sites of cancer metastases, while the other (the spleen) rarely has any?”
― Siddhartha Mukherjee, The Song of the Cell: An Exploration of Medicine and the New Human

“metaphor. What the young man laments is that he hasn’t learned the interconnectedness of the individual inhabitants of the rain forest—their ecology, interdependence—how the forest acts and lives as a whole.”
― Siddhartha Mukherjee, The Song of the Cell: An Exploration of Medicine and the New Human

“The playlist is set. The same series of songs get played over and over, like a malevolent tune that one cannot get out of one’s head.”
― Siddhartha Mukherjee, The Song of the Cell: An Exploration of Medicine and the New Human

“In cancer, the fixity of mutations won’t allow the order of the songs to change.”
― Siddhartha Mukherjee, The Song of the Cell: An Exploration of Medicine and the New Human

“Imagine that all the genes in the cells—the entirety of its genome—is a fixed, preselected playlist. Stem cells can choose which songs to play, and in what order, as they change from self-renewal to differentiation.”
― Siddhartha Mukherjee, The Song of the Cell: An Exploration of Medicine and the New Human

“One astonishing feature of cancer is that any individual specimen of cancer has a permutation of mutations that is unique to it.”
― Siddhartha Mukherjee, The Song of the Cell: An Exploration of Medicine and the New Human

“Some of the genes co-opt the metabolism of the cell, enabling it to use nutrients to drive the malignant rebirth of the cancer cell.”
― Siddhartha Mukherjee, The Song of the Cell: An Exploration of Medicine and the New Human

“I don’t mean to give cancer cells personalities. This is a Darwinian process, requiring natural selection:”
― Siddhartha Mukherjee, The Song of the Cell: An Exploration of Medicine and the New Human

“typically, it is a combination of both events—jammed accelerator genes and snapped brakes—that drives the dysfunctional growth of a cancer cell. The cars speed through the traffic jam, piling up on each other and causing tumors.”
― Siddhartha Mukherjee, The Song of the Cell: An Exploration of Medicine and the New Human

“But cancer is, in a sense, a disorder of internal homeostasis: its hallmark is that cell division is dysregulated. The genes that control these accelerators and brakes are broken—i.e., mutated—such that proteins that they encode, the regulators of cell division, no longer function in their appropriate contexts. The accelerators are permanently jammed, or the brakes fail permanently.”
― Siddhartha Mukherjee, The Song of the Cell: An Exploration of Medicine and the New Human

“But here’s the cell biological conundrum: What makes the skin cells start growing? And, more pertinently for cancer, what makes them stop? Each time we cut ourselves, why don’t we grow a new appendage, like a tree growing a branch?”
― Siddhartha Mukherjee, The Song of the Cell: An Exploration of Medicine and the New Human