What We Really Are Is an Agglomeration of Cells

During a “mid-pandemic limbo,” Siddhartha Mukherjee decided to build his own microscope. 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. After scrapping dozens of prototypes, he finally constructed a workable contraption. 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. “The drop came sharply into view,” he writes in The Song of the Cell, “and then a whole world within it.”

The Song of the Cell, out on October 25, is Mukherjee’s fourth book. 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 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. 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.

So naturally our conversation ranged widely over Mukherjee’s many occupations. Sporting