Do Cells Have a Song?

Remember High School Biology? How much fun was it to draw and label cells. I especially liked the Golgi bodies. If you liked biology and learning how things in the body work, then you might enjoy a new book by Suddhartha Mukherjee. Dr. Mukherjee’s lab at CU/NYU Presbytarian Hospital focuses on discovering new cancer drugs. He has written a number of books about cancer and its relationship in the body to one’s DNA. His new book is entitled The Song of the Cell. The book traces medical science from the the late 1600’s when two scientists, looking through their homemade microscopes, discovered a cell!! It was quite a radical comcept to think of the human body, and all other organisms, as being made up of tiny units they named cells. The book brings hope by telling about new technologies that could cure diseases and improve quality of life.

Critics have praised The Song of the Cell because “It is part mystery, part adventure story’, Jennifer Egan,

A Washington Post reviewer says, “Mukherjee expresses abstract intellectual ideas through emotional stories…and swaddles his medical rigor with rhapsodic tenderness, surprising vulnerability, and occasional flashes of pure poetry.”