71 pages • 2 hours read
The Song of the Cell: An Exploration of Medicine and the New Human
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Background
Authorial Context: The Song of the Cell and Mukherjee’s Previous Publications
Mukherjee authored three books before The Song of the Cell. The first is The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer (2010), which won the 2011 Pulitzer Prize in general nonfiction. This book examines the history of cancer from its first identification in ancient Egypt some 4,600 years ago as well as the quest to find cures. In his second book, The Laws of Medicine: Field Notes from an Uncertain Science (2015), Mukherjee focuses on three crucial elements of medicine: intuition, statistical outliers, and human bias. His third book is The Gene: An Intimate History (2017). In it, he explores the hunt to decode and decipher the gene, which is the code of life. Through these three books, Mukherjee established himself as not only a prolific scholar but also an excellent science communicator. In each of his three books, he explains extremely complex issues through personal narratives, experiments, and history so that the topics are understandable to scholars and non-scholars alike.
As Mukherjee notes, his fourth book, The Song of the Cell, “takes us on a very different journey” (14) compared to his other books. Three articles he wrote for The New Yorker magazine served as the origin of The Song of the Cell. The first article, written in 2017, focused on how T cells fight cancer. The second article (2019) examined why certain organs in the body are more hospitable to malignant tumors than others and how emerging cell therapies might cure them. The third article (2020), written in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, explored how viruses impact human cells and bodies—and how some cause particular destruction to physiology. The story of cells and cellular engineering is a common thread in the three articles, and Mukherjee decided to expand them into a book:
There was a revolution in the making, and a history (and future) that had been unwritten: of cells, of our capacity to manipulate cells, and of the transformation of medicine that is unfolding as this revolution unfolds (xvi).
In The Song of the Cell, Mukherjee focuses on individuals (including himself) who strive to understand life by better understanding the cell, alongside new cellular therapies that use cells to “rebuild and repair humans” (15). Throughout the book, Mukherjee attempts to move the field of biology away from the gene and toward the cell as the basic building block of life.
Scientific Context: The Branches of Living Organisms and the Evolution of Cells
While Mukherjee focuses on the history of cell biology in The Song of the Cell, the branches of living organisms and evolution of cells provide important context. There are three distinct branches of living organisms. The first is bacteria, which are “single-celled organisms that are surrounded by a cell membrane, lack particular cellular structure found in animal and plant cells, and possess other structures that are unique to them” (68). These differences between human and bacterial cells are what make antibiotics so successful. Bacteria live in many different kinds of environments, though most bacteria don’t cause disease. In fact, humans have millions of bacteria on the skin, in the gut, and in the mouth that are harmless or helpful. For example, bacteria in the stomach helps with digestion.
The second branch is eukaryotes, which “refers to the idea that our cells, and the cells of animals, fungi, and plants, contain a special structure, which bacteria don’t have, called a nucleus” (68). The nucleus stores chromosomes. Eukaryotes, including humans, are weaker and live in far more restricted environments than bacteria do.
The third branch is archaea, which was discovered only about 50 years ago, in part because archaea look like bacteria. Despite this similarity, archaea are evolutionarily different than bacteria. Very little is known about this branch.
The history of the cell dates back billions of years. The first cell, called a protocell, was simple but had the ability to replicate (reproduce). Evolutionary biologists believe that the protocell’s replication system contained strands of ribonucleic acid (RNA). These strands developed into molecules of self-replicating RNA. Mukherjee emphasizes that this feat wasn’t simple. Self-replication required two RNA molecules (one that acted as the information carrier, known as the template, and the other that acted as the duplicator) as well as a membrane to keep these two molecules together.
Bacteria evolved from these simple cells about three billion years ago, and they continue to evolve. Research suggests that archaea are just as old as bacteria. The first modern cell, which represents “the common ancestor of human cells, plant cells, fungi cells, and amoebal cells” (71), evolved about two billion years ago. Evidence suggests that this cell might have come from archaea. Thus, there might be only two branches of living organisms: “We are, perhaps, life-come-lately, the sawdust left over from the carvings of the two domains of life” (71).
Understanding these two aspects (branches of living organisms and the evolution of cells) is important to Mukherjee because, he argues, the field of biology should focus on the cell (and not the gene). Thus, it’s helpful to understand where cells came from in addition to the history of cell biology.
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