Siddhartha Mukherjee, the author of “The Song of the Cell.” Credit. (What Hooke saw weren’t actually “cells” per se, but the walls that plant cells build around themselves.) Hooke decided on the name “cell,” from “cella,” the Latin word for “small room.” Mukherjee whisks us off to the 17th century, when a Dutch cloth merchant named Antonie van Leeuwenhoek trained a simple microscope (which he had been using to examine textile fibers) on a droplet of water, entranced by the wriggling organisms he would call “animalcules.” Less than a decade before, the English scientist Robert Hooke had observed a “great many little boxes” when he put a thin slice of cork under a microscope. There may be “no single adversary,” as he puts it, but the book has a protagonist, even if it is protean, and sometimes unreliable: not so much the cell itself but our comprehension of it.

“The organization is cellular, if you will.”īut Mukherjee, an oncologist, is too much of a writer to give up on narrative just yet. “The Gene” (2016), he says, “was propelled by the quest to decode and decipher the code of life” his first book, the superb “The Emperor of All Maladies” (2010), which won a Pulitzer Prize, was animated by “the aching quest to find cures for cancer or to prevent it.” This latest effort - with sections on cell biology, on neurons, on immunotherapy, among other topics - “is itself a sum of parts,” Mukherjee writes. They’re questions that Mukherjee himself anticipates in the early pages of “The Song of the Cell,” drawing a contrast between the structure of his new book and the arcs of his previous ones. What kind of organism might these smaller units add up to? What was the shape of the story he set out to tell?

But I also found myself wondering where we were going. Guided by Mukherjee’s granular narration (“As you keep swimming through the cell’s protoplasm …”), I was repeatedly dazzled by his pointillist scenes, the enthusiasm of his explanations, the immediacy of his metaphors. Even though cells are typically so tiny that you need a microscope to see them, they also happen to be implicated in almost anything to do with medicine - and therefore almost anything to do with life. In his new book, “The Song of the Cell,” Siddhartha Mukherjee has taken on a subject that is enormous and minuscule at once. THE SONG OF THE CELL: An Exploration of Medicine and the New Human, by Siddhartha Mukherjee

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