The Song of the Cell by Siddhartha Mukherjee
Pulitzer Prize-winning author and oncologist Siddhartha Mukherjee returns with The Song of the Cell, his third work on the exploration of medicine and the human body. As Mukherjee states simply in his introduction, it is an attempt to understand ‘life in terms of its simplest unit – the cell’.
In pursuit of this understanding, Mukherjee conjures a thrilling narrative of historical scientific discovery. Mukherjee’s own excitement at the revelatory moment in which 17th-century Dutch merchant and inventor Antonie Van Leeuwenhoek discovers ‘animalcules’ in standing rainwater suffuses the book, generating the same excitement in the reader.
This is not just a tale of scientific discovery though. It is a book about medicine and about healing. Divided into six parts each containing sub-chapters, The Song of the Cell appears to be on a triumphant march – Part 1: Discovery; Part 2: The One and the Many; Part 3: Blood – and then the record scratches. Part 4: Knowledge is just 15 pages long and its lone sub-chapter is entitled ‘Pandemic’. Here, Mukherjee conveys so evocatively the wrenching dislocation of realising what we don’t know about medicine, and what we still need to learn about the human body.
Mukherjee deftly combines the thrill of life-changing scientific discovery with the experience of treating patients in a rollicking and yet deeply reflective story of the most essential building block of life itself: the cell and the curiosity to understand it.
The gift of this book is Mukherjee’s skill in drawing us all into the collective endeavour to understand the world and ourselves, and to work towards healing ourselves.