Product Description
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).
Amazon.com Review
An Amazon Best Book of November 2022:Song of the Cell is a feat of storytelling. Siddhartha Mukherjee seamlessly pulls together personal anecdotes, little-known history (including a massive feud between two pancreatic experts with all the drama of Hamilton), and the latest health research. We know words like "hormones" and "liver," but Mukherjee makes us truly understand how they function, and where they fit into our body as a whole. The name of the book describes how cells make the "symphony" of our body, all the disparate functions that work to keep us alive (and how they break down as we approach death). I even learned more about COVID, despite feeling like we’ve read it all. This is a book that deserves to be read slowly and thoughtfully, to revel in the awe of the human body that comes through in every word written by Mukherjee, also the Pulitzer-prize winning author of The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer, and a practicing physician and researcher. When it comes to the body, Mukherjee says: “We have learned so much. We have so much left to learn.” A philosophical take on the body, and life. —Lindsay Powers, Amazon Editor
Review
Praise for Song of the Cell
“This expansive, immersive book posits a new way forward in medicine thanks to the cell: new ways of treating patients, new medicines to create, new ways of healing, and new ways of understanding ourselves.” —Jaime Rochelle Herndon, Columbia Magazine
“In an account that’s both lyrical and capacious, Mukherjee takes us through an evolution of human understanding: fro
