The Song of the Cell Review: Medicine at the Edge of Understanding
Modern medicine can remove a patient’s T cells, engineer them in a laboratory and return them with receptors designed to recognise cancer . It can transplant healthy blood-forming stem cells and reprogramme mature cells into an embryonic-like pluripotent state. Yet it often struggles to predict how any one intervention will behave inside the changing ecology of an individual body. That gap between intervention and understanding is the most compelling subject of Siddhartha Mukherjee’s The Song of the Cell . The book follows the history of cell biology from the first microscopes and early theories of disease to immunotherapy, reproductive medicine and regenerative treatments. Its deeper concern is the unstable distance between seeing a biological phenomenon, explaining it and learning to control it. Medicine has repeatedly acquired the power to alter cellular behaviour before it fully understood what that behaviour meant within the larger organism. Sometimes that asymmetry saves live...