Book Review: Song of the Cell
A magnum opus and love letter to the science and medicine of cells
“The discovery of the function of pancreatic cells began, inauspiciously, with a quarrel between two anatomists that ended in a murder.”
This shocking line opens a chapter on hormones and glandular tissue in Dr. Siddartha Mukherjee’s excellent new book The Song of the Cell: An Exploration of Medicine and the New Human. One of his Mukherjee’s greatest gifts as a writer is his ability to unearth and relay the unbelievable human stories behind the dry, official narratives in our medical textbooks, and all of his work is packed with similar tales. I have mentioned this book and Mukherjee’s other writing in passing on this Substack, but after finishing this recently, it was incredible enough that I wanted to dedicate a whole post to reviewing it.
Song of the Cell is a tour de force through the past, present, and future of cell biology. The focus throughout is connecting how the fundamental scientific discoveries of the last 200-300 years paved the way for “New Humans”: People with transpla…
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