BOOK REVIEW : The Song of the Cell by Siddharta Mukherjee Simon & Schuster 2023
reviewed by GOETZ KLOECKER , MD
This “ chronicle of the cell ” by the Pulitzer Prize winner for The Emperor of all Maladies is another absolutely enjoyable literary time travel from the 1600s to the near future of regenerative cell therapy and the science of human enhancement .
The first cells arose 3 to 4 billion years ago , 700 million years after the birth of Earth , but have lived a secret life until someone put two magnifying lenses on the top and bottom of a tube in the 17th century .
The microcosm of cells was first made visible by the Dutch glassmakers Hans and Zacharia Janssen and by the British polymath Robert Hooke and also the Dutch cloth merchant Anthonie von Leeuwenhoek .
The book takes us quickly through the following two centuries until finally two radical ideas were proposed in the 19th century by a few German scientists , Theodor Schwann ( zoology ), Mattias Schleiden ( botany ), Johannes Mueller ( physiology ): “ All living organisms are composed of cells ” and “ The cell is the basic unit .” Francois Raspail , imprisoned then exiled from France for his political engagement , was the first who recognized in 1825 : “ Omnis cellula e cellula .”
Mukherjee then describes artfully the academic career of Rudolf Virchow in Berlin at the time of Bismarck . He tells about the professor ’ s increasing social activism as well as his towering influence on medicine , postulating , “ All pathology is cellular pathology ,” the beginning of modern medicine . The book makes each of these historical figures living , breathing characters and one wishes one could follow them along more . But to describe the rapid pace of modern medicine over the last 150 years in 400 pages , the author can give the reader only an amuse bouche , whetting the appetite to learn more .
Louis Pasteur , Robert Koch , Joseph Lister and Ignaz Semmelweis are the next giants in the book on whose shoulders we stand by identifying that cells and germs cause diseases . While Pasteur , Koch and Lister enjoyed their well-deserved fame for discovering hygiene and antibiotics , Semmelweis was dismissed from Vienna after calling childbed fever “ the doctor ’ s plague .” He was admitted to an asylum in Budapest , dying shortly after of sepsis ( an unjust
18 LOUISVILLE MEDICINE