Winner of the 2023 PROSE Award for Excellence in Biological and Life Sciences and the 2023
Chautauqua Prize! Named a New York Times Notable Book and a Best Book of the Year by The
Economist Oprah Daily BookPage Book Riot the New York Public Library and more! In The Song
of the Cell the extraordinary author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning The Emperor of All Maladies
and the #1 New York Times bestseller The Gene blends cutting-edge research impeccable
scholarship intrepid reporting and gorgeous prose into an encyclopedic study that reads like
a literary page-turner (Oprah Daily). Mukherjee begins this magnificent story in the late 1600s
when a distinguished English polymath Robert Hooke and an eccentric Dutch cloth-merchant
Antonie van Leeuwenhoek looked down their handmade microscopes. What they saw introduced a
radical concept that swept through biology and medicine touching virtually every aspect of the
two sciences and altering both forever. It was the fact that complex living organisms are
assemblages of tiny self-contained self-regulating units. Our organs our physiology our
selves-hearts blood brains-are built from these compartments. Hooke christened them cells.
The discovery of cells-and the reframing of the human body as a cellular ecosystem-announced
the birth of a new kind of medicine based on the therapeutic manipulations of cells. A hip
fracture a cardiac arrest Alzheimer's dementia AIDS pneumonia lung cancer kidney failure
arthritis COVID pneumonia-all could be reconceived as the results of cells or systems of
cells functioning abnormally. And all could be perceived as loci of cellular therapies. Filled
with writing so vivid lucid and suspenseful that complex science becomes thrilling The Song
of the Cell tells the story of how scientists discovered cells began to understand them and
are now using that knowledge to create new humans. Told in six parts and laced with
Mukherjee's own experience as a researcher a doctor and a prolific reader The Song of the
Cell is both panoramic and intimate-a masterpiece on what it means to be human. In an account
both lyrical and capacious Mukherjee takes us through an evolution of human understanding:
from the seventeenth-century discovery that humans are made up of cells to our cutting-edge
technologies for manipulating and deploying cells for therapeutic purposes (The New Yorker).
