Siddhartha Mukherjee is the author of The New York Times bestseller The Gene: An Intimate History; The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer, winner of the 2011 Pulitzer Prize in general nonfiction; and The Laws of Medicine. He is also an associate professor of medicine at Columbia University and a cancer physician and researcher. The Song of the Cell: An Exploration of Medicine and the New Human (Scribner) begins in the late 1600s, when an English polymath, Robert Hooke, and an eccentric Dutch cloth merchant, Antonie van Leeuwenhoek, looked through their handmade microscopes. What they saw introduced a radical concept that swept through biology and medicine: Complex living organisms are assemblages of tiny, self-contained, self-regulating units. Our organs, our physiology, and our selves are built from these compartments, which Hooke named “cells.” Reframing the human body as a cellular ecosystem marked the birth of a new kind of medicine based on manipulating cells, and here Mukherjee tells the story of how scientists discovered cells, began understanding them, and are now using that knowledge to create new humans.
