In 2010, oncologist Siddhartha Mukherjee’s Pulitzer Prize-winning The Emperor of All Maladies offered a shocking historical past of most cancers and medical scientists’ ongoing analysis into methods to beat it. In 2016, he delivered a equally breathtaking remedy of genetic biology in The Gene. Now, in The Song of the Cell: An Exploration of Medicine and the New Human, Mukherjee tells the compelling story of cell biology and the ways in which mobile engineering might help us rethink what it means to be human.
Drawing on case research, interviews, visits with sufferers, scientific papers and historic archives, Mukherjee tries to grasp life in phrases of its smallest unit: the cell. As he places it, he’s listening to a cell’s “music” when he observes its anatomy and the approach it interacts with surrounding cells. For instance, the genes, proteins and pathways used by wholesome cells are “appropriated” or “commandeered” by most cancers cells. “Cancer, in short, is cell biology visualized in a pathological mirror,” Mukherjee writes.
Such data permits medical researchers and docs to think about how mobile remedy may modify a affected person’s mobile construction to deal with their illness or medical dysfunction. In one case, a lady named Emily Whitehead, who was recognized with acute lymphoblastic leukemia, obtained CAR T-cell remedy: Her personal T-cells have been extracted, modified to focus on her illness and infused again into her physique. Although there was an preliminary setback as a result of of an an infection, the mobile remedy succeeded. Mukherjee consists of different tales like Whitehead’s, in addition to these of heroes reminiscent of Rudolf Virchow, who found that “it isn’t sufficient to locate a disease in an organ; it’s necessary to understand which cells of the organ are responsible”; John Snow, the founder of germ idea; and Frederick Banting and Charles Best, who found insulin.
According to Mukherjee, the cell sings of a brand new human who’s “rebuilt anew with modified cells [and] who looks and feels (mostly) like you and me.” Using mobile engineering, he writes, “we’ve altered these humans to alleviate suffering, using a science that had to be handcrafted and carved with unfathomable labor and love, and technologies so ingenious that they stretch credulity: such as fusing a cancer cell with an immune cell to produce an immortal cell to cure cancer.” Captivating and provocative, The Song of the Cell encourages us to rethink historic approaches to medical science and picture how mobile biology can reshape medication and public well being.
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