ON 25 July 1978, Louise Joy Brown was born at Oldham General Hospital in the UK. The first child to be born following IVF, she was called a miracle baby by some, a test-tube baby by others, and a representation of the by at least one.
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A hundred years earlier, Walther Flemming, a German scientist, coined the term chromatin, meaning coloured substance, while he was looking at stained human cells dividing under a microscope. The thickening and division of chromosomes, structures that are formed from chromatin, must be key for successful cell division, Flemming concluded.
The joy of Siddartha Mukherjee’s new book, The Song of the Cell: An exploration of medicine and the new human, is that these two episodes happen within just a few pages of each other.
Mukherjee describes how Robert Edwards, one of the pioneers of IVF, struck an ecstatic note as he described finally figuring out a way to keep human egg cells primed for fertilisation in a petri dish.
“Excitement beyond belief,” Edwards wrote. “The chromosomes were just beginning their march through the centre of the egg.”
An apparently straightforward insight about chromosomes in one century has now become life-changing for hundreds of thousands of people in the next. This trick of linking seemingly small observations about the cell to their profound implications years later is used by Mukherjee to electrifying effect throughout his book.
There are other highlights. Take the causes of common diseases, such as diabetes. Mukherjee analyses them forensically, making clear the difficulty and time it took to understand them.
He is also excellent when charting the history of our understanding of the immune system. On the invention of vaccination, he gives credit to the Indian and Chinese physicians who practised a basic form of inoculation centuries before Edward Jenner realised that having had cowpox could protect a person against smallpox.
The book is ambitious in its scope, ranging widely from the realisation, in the 1600s, that all living things were made from cells to the dramatic promises of gene therapies today.
However, this is both its strength and its key weakness. Detailing a hundred years of failure, discovery and more failure in a few pages makes for an exciting read, but it left me wishing that Mukherjee, who won a Pulitzer prize for his earlier book The Emperor of All Maladies: A biography of cancer, would take a bit more time to detail each of the topics in the book.
For example, he describes the neuron as perhaps the “most subtle and the most magnificent” cell of them all, but spends only a brief chapter on the topic. The impact of covid-19 on human cells also receives just a single chapter, though this is easier to accept since we are only now starting to understand the virus.
The book is at its strongest when discussing cancer, which makes sense considering Mukherjee’s day job as an oncologist. For anyone new to the biology of cancer, his writing is a revelation. He details the complexities of treating cancer and explains clearly why the disease has been – and continues to be – so difficult to treat. By describing in moving detail his experiences with people with cancer, he shows us the consequences of the gaps in our knowledge.
It has been more than 350 years since Robert Hooke coined the term cell. In the time since, we have devised all sorts of ways to manipulate them – even editing the genes of embryos. The Song of the Cell is both a love letter to its subject and a passionate reminder of how much we still have to learn about this most basic unit of life.
