Winner of the 2023 PROSE Award for Excellence in Biological and Life
Sciences!
Named a New York Times Notable Book and a Best Book of the Year by
The Economist, Oprah Daily, BookPage, Book Riot, the New York Public
Library, and more!
In The Song of the Cell, the extraordinary author of the Pulitzer
Prize-winning The Emperor of All Maladies and the #1 New York Times
bestseller The Gene "blends cutting-edge research, impeccable
scholarship, intrepid reporting, and gorgeous prose into an encyclopedic
study that reads like a literary page-turner" (Oprah Daily).
Mukherjee begins this magnificent story in the late 1600s, when a
distinguished English polymath, Robert Hooke, and an eccentric Dutch
cloth-merchant, Antonie van Leeuwenhoek looked down their handmade
microscopes. What they saw introduced a radical concept that swept
through biology and medicine, touching virtually every aspect of the two
sciences, and altering both forever. It was the fact that complex living
organisms are assemblages of tiny, self-contained, self-regulating
units. Our organs, our physiology, our selves--hearts, blood,
brains--are built from these compartments. Hooke christened them
"cells."
The discovery of cells--and the reframing of the human body as a
cellular ecosystem--announced the birth of a new kind of medicine based
on the therapeutic manipulations of cells. A hip fracture, a cardiac
arrest, Alzheimer's dementia, AIDS, pneumonia, lung cancer, kidney
failure, arthritis, COVID pneumonia--all could be reconceived as the
results of cells, or systems of cells, functioning abnormally. And all
could be perceived as loci of cellular therapies.
Filled with writing so vivid, lucid, and suspenseful that complex
science becomes thrilling, The Song of the Cell tells the story of how
scientists discovered cells, began to understand them, and are now using
that knowledge to create new humans. Told in six parts, and laced with
Mukherjee's own experience as a researcher, a doctor, and a prolific
reader, The Song of the Cell is both panoramic and intimate--a
masterpiece on what it means to be human.
"In an account both lyrical and capacious, Mukherjee takes us through an
evolution of human understanding: from the seventeenth-century discovery
that humans are made up of cells to our cutting-edge technologies for
manipulating and deploying cells for therapeutic purposes" (The New
Yorker).
