A THEORY OF EVERYTHING

THERE IS VERY LITTLE THAT SIDDHARTHA MUKHERJEE LEAVES OUT IN HIS ENJOYABLE STUDY OF THE CELL

- Shreevatsa Nevatia

Siddhartha Mukherjee remembers well the thrill of seeing his first cell. It was a Monday morning in 1993. Mukherjee, then a graduate student at Oxford, was inspecting a kidney-shaped T cell under a microscope. Like eyes looking back at me,” he writes in his book. And then, to my astonishment, the T cell moved—deliberately, purposefully, seeking out an infected cell that it might purge and kill. It was alive.” Reading The Song of the Cell, Mukherjee’s wonder, one finds, is often infectious. He tells persuasively, even entertainingly, the story of a life within a life’, the unit that forms part of a whole.

The third part of a quartet, Song... shares with Mukherjee’s earlier books— The Emperor of All Maladies and The Gene—both its urgency and encyclopaedic thoroughness, but with this addition, says the author, I’m sort of ascending the complexities of life’s ladder.” Mukherjee describes DNA as a beautiful” and iconic” molecule, but ultimately, he adds, it’s lifeless without cells”. The physician presses on. To really understand anything about life, you must understand its fundamental unit—the cell.” Historically, cell biology has always come up as humble against the more eye-catching biological laws of genetics and evolution, but Mukherjee hopes his latest book might correct that crucial lacuna.