The Song of the Cell by Siddhartha Mukherjee — what makes our cells tick?
When does replacing the cells that cause cancer — or even a dodgy knee — cross the line into constructing a new type of human? Siddhartha Mukherjee questions how we distinguish treatment from enhancement, as he chronicles a new revolution in the biology of our building blocks: cells. The polymath believes we will move from curing illnesses to stealthily changing who we are. The new human will not be a science fiction vision of a cyborg from the film The Matrix, which he describes as “Keanu Reeves in a black muumuu”, but instead, “rebuilt anew with modified cells, who looks and feels (mostly) like you and me”.
In The Song of the Cell, Mukherjee takes readers on a journey from the discovery of the cell in the late 1600s to the present day, when scientists are using cells to create restorative therapies. Recent breakthroughs have enabled scientists to turn back the cellular clock to the original raw material — called stem cells — and begin to grow cells to order.
Mukherjee is a passionate, expert guide. As an oncologist, he spends his life studying cells that go wrong, causing cancer, and his lab at Columbia University has made its own significant discoveries in cell biology. He is also a skilled author with an eclectic style, honed in his last book The Gene and the acclaimed The Emperor of All Maladies, where he managed to make cancer compelling reading. He weaves together charming histories of scientists, his own, sometimes painful, memories of patients and friends lost to illness, and the complex science of what makes cells tick.
This story originally appeared on: Financial Times - Author:Hannah Kuchler
