So I’m climbing toward a more accurate and complete description of human biology and human physiology. It integrates information, divides, and perpetuates that so that you can form a multicellular organism.Īnd the time had come to pan back even more beyond that iconographic description of human beings as an agglomeration of genes and DNA, to what we really are, which is agglomerations of cells, which interpret DNA, integrate signals, and create everything that’s functional about ourselves, our metabolics and our capacities. The second is that it’s an information-integrating machine. The first thing is that it’s an information-decoding machine. It’s the cell that allows the integration of information, that emerges from the genome and integrates that information to create function. The gene and DNA have been iconographic elements of ourselves for a century. How did you decide that cells would be the focus of your new book?įrom The Gene onward, I’ve been thinking more and more about how to move upward-and by upward I mean from a more reductive approach to a more holistic approach. We also discuss what motivated him to train his attention on cells, the relationship between lowbrow tinkering and highbrow science, whether science writing is a form of literature, the limits of cancer genetics, the impact his popular writing has had on his colleagues, and how often it is that useful scientific ideas come up informally and spontaneously at the dinner table.įANTASTIC VOYAGE: Siddhartha Mukherjee says that as you get deeper and deeper into the workings of the cell, “you begin to realize what a fantastic thing there is in this integrating machine.” Photo courtesy of Deborah Feingold. Sporting a head of tousled hair and a slightly unbuttoned black shirt, he spoke to me over Zoom about how his new book explores, in a series of scientific, historical, and personal narratives, the role cells play as a primary element of life. So naturally our conversation ranged widely over Mukherjee’s many occupations. When he’s not writing stories for The New Yorker, Mukherjee works clinically and conducts research in cancer cell biology and treatment, including ongoing clinical trials examining how dietary management may play a role in cancer care. The renowned filmmaker Ken Burns adapted The Emperor of All Maladies into a documentary, and when Mukherjee wrote The Gene: An Intimate History, in 2016, Burns adapted that, too. His first book, The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer, won the 2011 Pulitzer Prize in General Nonfiction as well as the Guardian First Book award. The Song of the Cell, out on October 25, is Mukherjee’s fourth book. “The drop came sharply into view,” he writes in The Song of the Cell, “and then a whole world within it.” Mukherjee-a Pulitzer Prize-winning author, medical oncologist, and associate professor of medicine at Columbia University-used his homemade device to glimpse cells in a drop of rainwater. After scrapping dozens of prototypes, he finally constructed a workable contraption. He had to see what the 17th-century Dutch cloth merchant Antonie van Leeuwenhoek saw when he looked at a raindrop under one of his self-built microscopes and found tiny creatures he called “animalcules.” Simply writing about the founder of microbiology in his new book, The Song of the Cell: An Exploration of Medicine and the New Human, wasn’t enough. During a “mid-pandemic limbo,” Siddhartha Mukherjee decided to build his own microscope.
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