Summary of The Song of the Cell By Siddhartha Mukherjee: An Exploration of Medicine and the New Human

By Willie M. Joseph

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Summary of The Song of the Cell By Siddhartha Mukherjee: An Exploration of Medicine and the New Human

 

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The Song of the Cell is Siddhartha Mukherjee's latest book on the fundamental unit of life, cells. The discovery of cells announced the birth of a new kind of medicine - all diseases could be re-conceived as the results of cells, functioning abnormally.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Willie M. Joseph
• Release date: Dec 14, 2022
• ISBN: 9798215859391

Willie M. Joseph

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INTRODUCTION

We Shall Always Return to the Cell

In November 2017, I watched my friend Sam P. die because his cells had rebelled against his body. The melanoma had begun to travel across Sam's face toward his ear. If you looked closely, it had marked its progression like a ferry moving across the water. As an oncologist, I am a cell biologist who perceives the normal world of cells re ected and inverted in a looking glass. In Sam's case, I was engineering his immune system to turn his T cells into an army to ght the rebel army that was growing in his body.

In April 2016, the T cells that attacked his tumor turned on his own liver, provoking an autoimmune hepatitis. Sam maintained a steely dignity through these victories and setbacks. He died on a spring morning, about six months after I first felt his tumor. In 2010, 14-year-old Emily Whitehead was treated at the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia. She had been diagnosed with acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL) Treatment for ALL is among the most intensive chemo regimens ever devised.

About 90 percent of pediatric patients survive after treatment. The Whiteheads say they thought their daughter was going to die. Dr. June Grupp's daughter Emily Whitehead had a form of juvenile arthritis, an in ammatory condition. A drug that blocks the chemical messenger IL-6 was approved by the FDA just four months earlier. If Emily had died, it's likely that the whole trial would have been shut down, June says.

Photographs of Emily are plastered on the walls of the facility where T cells are modi ed, quality controlled, and manufactured. She could almost see into the ICU room where she had been conned for nearly a month. Author Carl Safran Foer's new book explores what he calls the new human - a human rebuilt anew with modi ed cells who looks and feels (mostly) like you and me. He describes a young boy undergoing an experimental bone marrow transplant using gene-edited cells to cure sickle cell disease. In the late 1800s, scientists discovered that all animal and plant tissues were made of cells.

The discovery of cells led to the reframing of the human body as a cellular ecosystem. A hip fracture, cardiac arrest, Alzheimer's dementia, AIDS, pneumonia, lung cancer, kidney failure, arthritis could all be reconceived as systems of cells, functioning abnormally. In 1922, a 14-year-old boy with type 1 diabetes was resuscitated from a coma by the infusion of insulin extracted from the pancreatic cells of a dog. In 2010, patients with sickle cell anemia are surviving, disease-free, with gene-modi ed blood stem cells. To be living, an organism must have the capacity to reproduce, to grow, to metabolize, to adapt to stimuli, and to maintain its internal milieu.

Complex, multicellular living beings also possess what I might call emergent properties: mechanisms to defend themselves against injury and invasion. Molecules within a cell read certain sections of the genetic code, enabling a gene's instructions to become physically manifest in the actual protein. A cell transforms information into form; genetic code into proteins. Cell division is what drives growth, repair, regeneration, and reproduction, among the fundamental, de ning features of life. When I met Emily Whitehead, it was as if she had allowed me into a portal that linked the future and the past.

She embodied our desire to get to the luminous heart of the cell, to understand its endlessly captivating mysteries. And she embodied our aching aspiration to witness the birth of a new kind of medicine based on cell therapies. At its core, he says, the pandemic was a disease of cells, just as the SARS-CoV2 virus was. In The Emperor of All Maladies, I wrote about the aching quest to nd cures for cancer or to prevent it. The Song of the Cell takes us on a very di erent journey: to understand life in terms of its simplest unit—the cell.

Gene