The Song of the Cell
Siddhartha Mukherjee
Scribner, $32.50
In the summer time of 1960, docs extracted “crimson sludge” from 6-year-old Barbara Lowry’s bones and gave it to her twin.
That surgical procedure, one of many first profitable bone marrow transplants, belied the issue of the process. In the early years of transplantation, scores of sufferers died as docs struggled to determine methods to use one particular person’s cells to deal with one other. “Cell therapy for blood diseases had a terrifying birth,” Siddhartha Mukherjee writes in his new ebook, The Song of the Cell.
The transplant story is one in every of many Mukherjee makes use of to place human faces and experiences on the coronary heart of medical progress. But what radiates off the pages is the creator himself. An oncologist, researcher and Pulitzer Prize–successful creator, Mukherjee’s curiosity and knowledge add pep to what, in much less dexterous arms, could be dry materials. He finds surprise in each side of cell biology, inspiration within the folks working on this area and “spine-tingling awe” of their discoveries.
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It’s no shock that Mukherjee is so seduced by science. This is a person who constructed a microscope from scratch in the course of the pandemic and has spent years probing biology and its historical past with luminaries within the area. The Song of the Cell lets readers listen in on these conversations, which may be intimate and enlightening.
On a automobile journey throughout the Netherlands, Mukherjee chats with geneticist Paul Nurse, who tells him in regards to the cell division work that finally netted Nurse a Nobel Prize (SN: 3/27/21, p. 28). On a stroll at Rockefeller University in New York
City, Mukherjee discusses his despair with one other Nobel Prize–successful researcher, neuroscientist Paul Greengard. Mukherjee’s vivid imagery lends heft to his emotions. He tells Greengard about experiencing a “soupy fog of grief” after his father’s loss of life and describes “drowning in a tide of sadness.”
In these reminiscences, which Mukherjee makes use of to segue into the science of despair, and elsewhere within the ebook, hints of poetry shimmer among the many prose. A cell noticed below a microscope is “refulgent, glimmering, alive.” A white blood cell’s gradual creep is just like the “ectoplasmic movement of an alien.” Mukherjee weaves his experiences into the story of cell biology, guiding readers via the lives and discoveries of key figures within the area. We meet the “father of microbiology,” Antonie van Leeuwenhoek, a seventeenth century material service provider who floor globules of Venetian glass into microscope lenses and spied a “marvelous cosmos of a living world” inside a raindrop. Mukherjee additionally teleports us to the current to introduce He Jiankui, the disgraced biophysicist behind the world’s first gene-edited infants (SN: 12/22/18 & 1/5/19, p. 20). Along the best way, we additionally meet Frances Kelsey, the Food and Drug Administration medical officer who refused to approve thalidomide, a drug now identified to trigger start defects, to be used within the United States, and Lynn Margulis, the evolutionary biologist who argued that mitochondria and different organelles had been as soon as free-living micro organism (SN: 8/8/15, p. 22).
Mukherjee traverses an enormous panorama of cell biology, and he’s not afraid to drag over and go exploring within the weeds. He describes intimately the flux of ions in nerve cells and introduces a substantial solid of immune system characters. For a good deeper dive, readers can verify the footnotes; they’re plentiful.
What stands out most, although, are Mukherjee’s tales about folks: scientists, docs, sufferers and himself. As a researcher and a doctor, he steps deftly between the scientific and scientific worlds, and, just like the microscope he assembled, gives a glimpse right into a universe we would not in any other case see.
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