Book Review: ‘The Song of the Cell,’ by Siddhartha Mukherjee - The New York Times

THE SONG OF THE CELL: An Exploration of Medicine and the New Human, by Siddhartha Mukherjee

In his caller book, “The Song of the Cell,” Siddhartha Mukherjee has taken connected a taxable that is tremendous and minuscule astatine once. Even though cells are typically truthful tiny that you request a microscope to spot them, they besides hap to beryllium implicated successful astir thing to bash with medicine — and truthful astir thing to bash with life. Guided by Mukherjee’s granular narration (“As you support swimming done the cell’s protoplasm …”), I was repeatedly dazzled by his pointillist scenes, the enthusiasm of his explanations, the immediacy of his metaphors. But I besides recovered myself wondering wherever we were going. What benignant of organism mightiness these smaller units adhd up to? What was the signifier of the communicative helium acceptable retired to tell?

They’re questions that Mukherjee himself anticipates successful the aboriginal pages of “The Song of the Cell,” drafting a opposition betwixt the operation of his caller publication and the arcs of his erstwhile ones. “The Gene” (2016), helium says, “was propelled by the quest to decode and decipher the codification of life”; his archetypal book, the superb “The Emperor of All Maladies” (2010), which won a Pulitzer Prize, was animated by “the aching quest to find cures for crab oregon to forestall it.” This latest effort — with sections connected compartment biology, connected neurons, connected immunotherapy, among different topics — “is itself a sum of parts,” Mukherjee writes. “The enactment is cellular, if you will.”

But Mukherjee, an oncologist, is too overmuch of a writer to springiness up connected communicative conscionable yet. There whitethorn beryllium “no azygous adversary,” arsenic helium puts it, but the publication has a protagonist, adjacent if it is protean, and sometimes unreliable: not truthful overmuch the compartment itself but our comprehension of it. Mukherjee whisks america disconnected to the 17th century, erstwhile a Dutch cloth merchant named Antonie van Leeuwenhoek trained a elemental microscope (which helium had been utilizing to analyse textile fibers) connected a droplet of water, entranced by the wriggling organisms helium would telephone “animalcules.” Less than a decennary before, the English idiosyncratic Robert Hooke had observed a “great galore small boxes” erstwhile helium enactment a bladed portion of cork nether a microscope. (What Hooke saw weren’t really “cells” per se, but the walls that works cells physique astir themselves.) Hooke decided connected the sanction “cell,” from “cella,” the Latin connection for “small room.”

Still, it wasn’t until the 19th period that we gained a acquisition connected what was happening successful those tiny rooms. In 1830s Berlin, the botanist Matthias Schleiden and the zoologist Theodor Schwann laid the foundations for compartment theory, positing that some plants and animals had a “common means of enactment done cells.” What were those cells doing? A French microscopist named François-Vincent Raspail projected that the compartment was a “laboratory” performing chemic processes that allowed an organism to function. The Prussian doc Rudolf Virchow showed that cells disagreement and beget caller cells. He besides offered a cellular mentation of disease: “Every pathological disturbance, each therapeutic effect, finds its eventual mentation lone erstwhile it’s imaginable to designate the circumstantial surviving cellular elements involved.”

It’s a potent statement, and Mukherjee says that it’s pinned connected a committee successful his office, a reminder that everything comes down to cells. “As an oncologist, I am, first, a compartment biologist,” Mukherjee writes, recalling however a person was dying of tegument crab due to the fact that the T cells that onslaught overseas pathogens couldn’t observe his melanoma, which was “invisible to his immune system.” Immune therapy for crab patients is cellular therapy. In vitro fertilization? That’s cellular therapy, too. DNA lives successful cells, and truthful familial engineering is yet — you guessed it — cellular therapy.

What this means is that Mukherjee has recovered an particularly roomy taxable for his roving intelligence. “I trained arsenic an immunologist astatine first, past a stem compartment idiosyncratic and, finally, a crab biologist earlier I became a aesculapian oncologist,” helium writes, directing the scholar to a footnote that mentions his “brief foray into neurobiology.” (A aboriginal section astir humor states that he’s besides “a hematologist by training.”) We larn astir phagocytosis (the ingestion of a pathogen by an immune cell) and homeostasis (the capableness of a compartment to support stableness and equilibrium); we besides larn astir the fable of Bali and Vamana, successful which arrogance invites comeuppance, and however Mukherjee’s grandma was truthful scarred by Partition that she lived with his household but kept successful a country to herself. The enactment of the publication whitethorn beryllium cellular, but the wide effect tin consciousness sprawling — similar a metropolis that allowed developers to support gathering beauteous houses portion doing small to incorporate them.

Similarly, immoderate of the penning successful “The Song of the Cell” is truthful beauteous that you tin get caught up successful its music. Mukherjee has an undeniable acquisition for metaphor, likening an antibody to a “gunslinging sheriff” and a T compartment to a “gumshoe detective.” Fatty plaques successful the arteries are “precarious mounds of debris alongside highways, accidents waiting to happen.” The indispensable but underappreciated glial compartment was for excessively agelong similar “a film-star’s adjunct stuck perpetually successful the shadows of celebrity.” A bacterial macromolecule is truthful bully astatine making precise changes to the quality genome that it’s arsenic if “it tin alteration Verbal to Herbal successful the preface to Volume 1 of ‘Samuel Pepys’ Diary’ successful a assemblage room containing 80,000 books.”

As for the compartment itself, it of people gets immoderate metaphors of its own. The “lone spaceship” of the book’s aboriginal chapters becomes a “founder,” and past a “colony,” Mukherjee writes. Blood makes him deliberation of a “cellular civilization”; crab makes him deliberation of a “cellular ecology.” His taxable conscionable gets bigger and bigger and bigger. “Why, mightiness you ask, bash the aesculapian mysteries of the Covid-19 pandemic beryllium astatine the halfway of a publication connected compartment biology?” Mukherjee muses. “Because compartment biology sits astatine the halfway of the aesculapian mysteries.”

If Mukherjee were different benignant of storyteller — tidier, if little honorable — helium could person showcased a much linear narrative, emphasizing however developments successful compartment probe person yielded immoderate genuinely astonishing possibilities. He himself has been collaborating connected a task to technologist definite cells successful the immune strategy truthful that they devour tumors without stirring up an indiscriminate inflammatory response.

But arsenic a practicing physician, helium has seen excessively overmuch suffering and decease to succumb to an casual triumphalism. He recalls the “exuberance” of the mid-2000s, erstwhile spectacular advances successful cistron sequencing had made it look arsenic if “we had unlocked the cardinal to cures for cancer.” Such exuberance turned retired to beryllium fleeting; the information from objective trials were “sobering.”

Many aesculapian mysteries stay unsolved. If the book’s protagonist — our knowing of compartment biology — seemed to beryllium riding precocious again connected caller advances successful immunology, specified “self-assuredness” was laid debased by the Covid-19 pandemic. Mukherjee presents a drawstring of questions that are inactive unsettled. “The monotony of answers is humbling, maddening,” helium writes. “We don’t know. We don’t know. We don’t know.”

THE SONG OF THE CELL: An Exploration of Medicine and the New Human | By Siddhartha Mukherjee | Illustrated | 473 pp. | Scribner | $32.50