While genetics and gene therapy get most of the attention in the press, the real workhorse of medicine is cellular biology. The discovery of cells—and the reframing of the human body as a cellular ecosystem—announced the birth of a new kind of medicine based on therapeutic manipulations of cells. A hip fracture, cardiac arrest, Alzheimer’s, AIDS, lung cancer, kidney failure, arthritis, COVID – all can be viewed as the result of cells, or systems of cells functioning abnormally. And all can be perceived as amenable to cellular therapies leading the way to creating a ‘new human’.
We will follow the growth of cellular biology from the 1600s when a Dutch Trader first looked through a single-lens handmade microscope and saw tiny living organisms in a drop of rainwater to major recent innovations in cellular technology. We will learn about basic working of cellular units, assemblages of cells to make organs and related cell pathologies. Along the way we will also meet many ‘new humans’ that are not science-fiction augmented characters, rather it is you and me, rebuilt using modified cells to alleviate suffering and curing real diseases.
The book we will be using, “The Song of the Cell”, (October 2022) by Pulitzer Prize winner Siddhartha Mukherjee. His two earlier books, “The Emperor of All Maladies” and “The Gene” were both bestsellers. The new book is both scholarly yet filled with emotional stories of real patients and the doctors and nurses who treat them. The book’s reviews have been uniformly positive. The Boston Globe, “What makes Mukherjee’s narrative so remarkable is that he imbues decades of painstaking laboratory investigation with the suspense of a mystery novel and urgency of a thriller.” The Washington Post, “Mukherjee expresses abstract intellectual ideas through emotional stories….and swaddles his medical rigor with rhapsodic tenderness, surprising vulnerability and occasional flashes of poetry.” Paul Nurse, 2001 Nobel Prize Winner of Medicine, “Deeply researched, The Song of the Cell is an extraordinary journey through the history of discovery of the most innovative cellular medicine practiced today and the promise of what lies ahead.”
