'The Song of the Cell' offers tales from biology and history - Science News Magazine

The Song of the Cell
Siddhartha Mukherjee
Scribner, $32.50

In the summertime of 1960, doctors extracted “crimson sludge” from 6-year-old Barbara Lowry’s bones and gave it to her twin.

That surgery, 1 of the archetypal palmy bony marrow transplants, belied the trouble of the procedure. In the aboriginal years of transplantation, scores of patients died arsenic doctors struggled to fig retired however to usage 1 person’s cells to dainty another. “Cell therapy for humor diseases had a terrifying birth,” Siddhartha Mukherjee writes successful his caller book, The Song of the Cell.

The transplant communicative is 1 of galore Mukherjee uses to enactment quality faces and experiences astatine the bosom of aesculapian progress. But what radiates disconnected the pages is the writer himself. An oncologist, researcher and Pulitzer Prize–winning author, Mukherjee’s curiosity and contented adhd pep to what, successful little dexterous hands, mightiness beryllium adust material. He finds wonderment successful each facet of compartment biology, inspiration successful the radical moving successful this tract and “spine-tingling awe” successful their discoveries.

It’s nary astonishment that Mukherjee is truthful seduced by science. This is simply a antheral who built a microscope from scratch during the pandemic and has spent years probing biology and its past with luminaries successful the field. The Song of the Cell lets readers eavesdrop connected these conversations, which tin beryllium intimate and enlightening.

On a car thrust crossed the Netherlands, Mukherjee chats with geneticist Paul Nurse, who tells him astir the compartment part enactment that yet netted Nurse a Nobel Prize (SN: 3/27/21, p. 28). On a locomotion astatine Rockefeller University successful New York

City, Mukherjee discusses his slump with different Nobel Prize–winning researcher, neuroscientist Paul Greengard. Mukherjee’s vivid imagery lends heft to his feelings. He tells Greengard astir experiencing a “soupy fog of grief” aft his father’s decease and describes “drowning successful a tide of sadness.”

In these memories, which Mukherjee uses to segue into the subject of depression, and elsewhere successful the book, hints of poesy shimmer among the prose. A compartment observed nether a microscope is “refulgent, glimmering, alive.” A achromatic humor cell’s dilatory creep is similar the “ectoplasmic question of an alien.” Mukherjee weaves his experiences into the communicative of compartment biology, guiding readers done the lives and discoveries of cardinal figures successful the field. We conscionable the “father of microbiology,” Antonie van Leeuwenhoek, a 17th period cloth merchant who crushed globules of Venetian solid into microscope lenses and spied a “marvelous cosmos of a surviving world” wrong a raindrop. Mukherjee besides teleports america to the contiguous to present He Jiankui, the disgraced biophysicist down the world’s archetypal gene-edited babies (SN: 12/22/18 & 1/5/19, p. 20). Along the way, we besides conscionable Frances Kelsey, the Food and Drug Administration aesculapian serviceman who refused to o.k. thalidomide, a cause present known to origin commencement defects, for usage successful the United States, and Lynn Margulis, the evolutionary biologist who argued that mitochondria and different organelles were erstwhile free-living bacteria (SN: 8/8/15, p. 22).

Mukherjee traverses a immense scenery of compartment biology, and he’s not acrophobic to propulsion implicit and spell exploring successful the weeds. He describes successful item the flux of ions successful nervus cells and introduces a sizeable formed of immune strategy characters. For an adjacent deeper dive, readers tin cheque the footnotes; they are abundant.

What stands retired most, though, are Mukherjee’s stories astir people: scientists, doctors, patients and himself. As a researcher and a physician, helium steps deftly betwixt the technological and objective worlds, and, similar the microscope helium assembled, offers a glimpse into a beingness we mightiness not different see.

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