The Song of the Cell: an Exploration of Medicine and the New Human by Siddhartha Mukherjee

Author:Siddhartha Mukherjee
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Scribner
Published: 2022-10-25T00:00:00+00:00

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I finished this part of the book, coincidentally, on a Monday morning, the day I reserve to look at blood. I left the office where I usually write and walked down the corridor to the microscope room. Empty and silent, thankfully. The lights went down, the scope flickered on. A box of glass slides was waiting on the table. I mounted one on the scope and turned the focusing knob.

Blood. A cosmos of cells. The restless ones: red blood cells. The guardians: multilobed neutrophils that mount the first phases of the immune response. The healers: tiny platelets—once-dismissed as fragmentary nonsense—that redefined how we respond to breaches in the body. The defenders, the discerners: B cells that make antibody missiles; T cells, door-to-door wanderers that can detect even the whiff of an invader, including, possibly, cancer.

As my eyes darted from one cell to another, I thought about the trajectory of this book. Our story has moved. Our vocabulary has shifted. Our metaphors have changed. Flip back a few pages, and we imagined the cell as a lone spaceship. Then, in the chapter “The Dividing Cell,” the cell was no longer single but became the progenitors of two cells, and then four. It was a founder, the originator of tissues, organs, bodies—fulfilling the dream of one cell becoming two and four. And then it transformed into a colony: the developing embryo, with cells settling and positioning themselves within the landscape of an organism.

And blood? It is a conglomerate of organs, a system of systems. It has built training camps for its armies (lymph nodes), highways and alleys to move its cells (blood vessels). It has citadels and walls that are constantly being surveyed and repaired by its residents (neutrophils and platelets). It has invented a system of identification cards to recognize its citizens and eject intruders (T cells) and an army to guard itself from invaders (B cells). It has evolved language, organization, memory, architecture, subcultures, and self-recognition. A new metaphor comes to mind. Perhaps we might think of it as a cellular civilization.

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