The Song of the Cell by Siddhartha Mukherjee

THE SONG OF THE CELL by Siddhartha Mukherjee offers “An Exploration of Medicine and the New Human.” Mukherjee won the Pulitzer Prize for 2010’s The Emperor of all Maladies and also wrote The Gene (2016) to great acclaim. In his latest he discusses the components of cells and much of the history behind our understanding of cellular biology. Do you remember creating a model of the cell in middle school with important structures like mitochondria (the energy powerhouses), the endoplasmic reticulum and its ribosomes used in protein synthesis, plus the nucleus center? Mukherjeee addresses all of these plus looks at processes like cell reproduction. He also reviews the role of technology, whether hundreds of years ago when single lens microscopes were used or recent work on immunity and cancer cells and many “mysteries beyond mysteries” which still exist. A well-written and fascinating review in which Mukherjee stresses we “don’t know what we don’t know,” THE SONG OF THE CELL received a starred review from Kirkus (“A luminous journey into cellular biology.”). Some related links: The Future of Everything (Wall Street Journal) podcast interview with Mukherjee about the future of cellular medicine; plus book reviews from The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal; I love the latter’s description of this new text: “an audacious, often mesmerizing, frequently dizzying, occasionally exhausting and reliably engaging tour of cell biology and scientific inquiry.”