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The Song of the Cell
Siddhartha Mukherjee
Scribner, $32.50
In the summertime 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. Within 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 remedy for blood ailments had a terrifying delivery,” Siddhartha Mukherjee writes in his new e book, The Track 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. However what radiates off the pages is the writer himself. An oncologist, researcher and Pulitzer Prize–profitable writer, Mukherjee’s curiosity and knowledge add pep to what, in much less dexterous arms, is likely to be dry materials. He finds surprise in each aspect of cell biology, inspiration within the individuals working on this area and “spine-tingling awe” of their discoveries.
It’s no shock that Mukherjee is so seduced by science. This can be a man who constructed a microscope from scratch through the pandemic and has spent years probing biology and its historical past with luminaries within the area. The Track of the Cell lets readers listen in on these conversations, which might be intimate and enlightening.
On a automobile trip throughout the Netherlands, Mukherjee chats with geneticist Paul Nurse, who tells him in regards to the cell division work that in the end netted Nurse a Nobel Prize (SN: 3/27/21, p. 28). On a stroll at Rockefeller College in New York
Metropolis, Mukherjee discusses his melancholy with one other Nobel Prize–profitable 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 dying and describes “drowning in a tide of disappointment.”
In these reminiscences, which Mukherjee makes use of to segue into the science of melancholy, and elsewhere within the e book, hints of poetry shimmer among the many prose. A cell noticed underneath a microscope is “refulgent, glimmering, alive.” A white blood cell’s gradual creep is just like the “ectoplasmic motion of an alien.” Mukherjee weaves his experiences into the story of cell biology, guiding readers by the lives and discoveries of key figures within the area. We meet the “father of microbiology,” Antonie van Leeuwenhoek, a seventeenth century fabric service provider who floor globules of Venetian glass into microscope lenses and spied a “marvelous cosmos of a residing 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 babies (SN: 12/22/18 & 1/5/19, p. 20). Alongside the best way, we additionally meet Frances Kelsey, the Meals and Drug Administration medical officer who refused to approve thalidomide, a drug now identified to trigger delivery defects, to be used in the USA, and Lynn Margulis, the evolutionary biologist who argued that mitochondria and other organelles were once free-living bacteria (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 forged of immune system characters. For a good deeper dive, readers can test the footnotes; they’re considerable.
What stands out most, although, are Mukherjee’s tales about individuals: 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’d not in any other case see.
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