Freethinkers Book Club
Song of the Cell: Exploration of Medicine and the New Human
By Siddhartha Mukherjee
Wednesday, January 24, 2024, 7:00 – 8:30 pm
Host: Karen C.
In Song of the Cell, Siddhartha Mukherjee begins this 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 -- complex living organisms are assemblages of tiny, self-contained, self-regulating units, which Hooke named “cells.”
The discovery of cells, and the reframing of the human body as a cellular ecosystem, paved the way for a new kind of medicine. 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 with therapeutic manipulations of cells as new treatments.
Written in a vivid and suspenseful manner, Mukherjee makes the telling of complex science a thrilling story. Told in six parts, the story covers the discovery of cells, how scientists began to understand them, and how they are now using this knowledge to create new humans.
Siddhartha Mukherjee is a Pulitzer Prize winning author, and Song of the Cells has been named a New York Times Notable Book and a Best Book of the Year by The Economist, Oprah Daily, BookPage, Book Riot, New York Public Library, and more. It was also winner of the 2023 PROSE Award for Excellence in Biological and Life Sciences and the 2023 Chautauqua Prize.
Mukherjee studied biology at Stanford University, obtained a D.Phil. from University of Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar, and an M.D. from Harvard University. He joined New York-Presbyterian Hospital/Columbia University Medical center in NYC in 2009. As of 2018, he is an Associate Professor of Medicine in the Division of Hematology and Oncology.
Feel free to join if you have not read the book, but if so, please take a look at one or more of these resources.
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