“Song of the Cell” by Siddhartha Mukherjee

I’m a big fan of Mukherjee’s writings, I read his first three books years ago and really enjoyed them. (Posts about those are here and here and here.) This work is a bit different from the others, but no less enjoyable.

I think this will be impossible to summarize, but to give a broad, sweeping overview, the book is about cell biology. He starts with how the concept of the cell came to be, then divulges down a few different paths. One is about cell growth, another about neurons, another about insulin. He takes different aspects of cells and goes through the history, figures that played major roles, and consequences of these concepts to science and medicine.

The biggest strength of this work is that Mukherjee is an expert at taking complicated processes and simplifying them so that any reader could understand. There are times where the structure of the book makes it difficult, some chapters are pages and pages of just the science. Which can be dull, but it never gets confusing or lost in the jargon. And the same things I loved about his other books are all present: the scientists and characters practically jump off of the page and have all of these personalities to them. Science history turns out to be full of really incredibly interesting people, I never knew that there was such a scuffle over who got the credit for isolating insulin that a murder was nearly committed!

There are elements of this structure that work a bit against it. I was initially very annoyed with the lack of chronological order in the work. The Emperor of all Maladies and The Gene are so clear in their history and how they track an idea over time, that gets lost here. But about halfway through you realize that there is no other way to do there, there would simply be too much information in too many different directions to line them all up chronologically. So I made my peace with that.

Another great strength is the care that Mukherjee takes with the people he highlights. Many of his friends and mentors are characters in the book where he’s describing their sickness or brilliance. There is practically a whole chapter dedicated to the nurses that cared for all of the early bone marrow transplant patients, which is so important and amazing as nurses are constantly overlooked in their contributions to the medical field. That they are credited so highly is a testament to their work and to the care Mukherjee has for the people he writes about.

One thing I felt odd about though is that towards the end Mukherjee writes about pending research happening in his lab. And the subject matter makes sense, it all flows logically, but for the one detail about how this work has not been peer reviewed and published yet. It feels like a move that would force a journal somewhere to publish it, as it’s already out in a book, instead of highlighting something that has already been established and reviewed. I don’t know, likely there is not an issue but as a scientist I felt weird about it.

Still a great science communicator, still a great writer. I don’t think there will ever be a time I don’t read and enjoy what Mukherjee writes and that definitely isn’t the case here either.