It is possible to explore almost any aspect of the living world if you choose to write about cells. They are a life within a life, as Siddhartha Mukherjee puts it in his latest book, which takes advantage of that licence to offer a comprehensive account of basic biology, along with a history of the many great minds that have helped us to see beyond widespread misconception to scientific truth.
There are intriguing tales of the many eccentrics whose contributions were vital to the transformation of medicine in this story. This is a book filled with mistakes and arguments. It almost made me feel bad for my scientific colleagues, who have toil away in labs in order to get a breakthrough.
Robert Hooke is one of the colorful characters. He put a piece of cork under a microscope and found it was made up of a lot of little boxes. The Latin word for small room is cella. Hooke didn't realize that animals are made up of the same basic components. He may have been distracted by the time he spent rebuilding London after the great fire, or by his claim that he had described gravity before the first man.
After a decade, a Dutch cloth merchant put a drop of rain under a homemade microscope and saw tiny organisms. Leeuwenhoek couldn't be believed. He didn't help himself by refusing to allow his equipment to be examined, instead relying on the very unscientific method of asking a ragtag collection of amateur citizens to testify that they saw what he had
Robert Remak saw a cell split in two while looking at chicken blood. He was not allowed to be a professor because he was Jewish, despite his discovery that new cells were created by the division of pre-existing ones.
Sometimes salutary and always engaging stories such as these are used to teach the basics of cell biology, but also to show that no one person is responsible for any advancement in science. Progress is made in a number of unlikely partnerships. We have vaccines because of a story told by a milkmaid about her clear skin, which protects us against cowpox.
It is as though the immune system is being offered an amuse-bouche of the cells’ insides
The Song of the Cell can help you understand biology. It is a great example of how cells work. Imagine a virus replicating inside a cell that is invisible to the immune system. The alien presence can be detected by the body's defences, which are completely outside the cell. MHC class 1 is a special molecule. It is shaped so that it can pick up the fragments. There is a presentation of its contents to the system. The immune system is being entertained by the insides of the cells. A foreign body is found and the cell is destroyed. The system was not fully understood until the 1980's, and I was reminded of how important it was to modern medicine. There is a way to explain why Covid has been so deadly.
The elegant march that turns a single fertilised cell into a fully formed, brand new human being is the epitome of this type of thing. We were thought to have appeared in the womb as miniaturised versions of ourselves, and all we had to do was grow up. We were sculpted from menstrual blood, according to Aristotle. The truth is even better. There are billions when one cell splits. Each of the new cells has its own destiny despite the fact that they all started out the same. They don't know what to do. It is an elaborate, multipart symphony that has been perfect for millions of years.
It is surprising that everything works well and that there are very few mistakes. Things don't go well. Cancer cells don't obey the processes that keep them under control. They find ways to get around our defences so that they can increase in size. Mukherjee uses seminal medical cases and others from his personal and working life to show how the immune system can be used to fight rogue cells. Scientists came up with a way to combine a cancer cell with a blood cell. The immortality of a cancer cell gave way to the creation of a new cell called the plasma cell. One of the first to benefit was a doctor who was dying from cancer. Her tumours melted away and she was alive.
A lot of information is given in this book. Mukherjee uses visual metaphors to simplify things. The reader is asked to imagine that they are investigating a cell as if it is a spaceship. These images were too simple for my liking. His overall achievement is to have created a guide with personality that can be understood even if you don't know much about the subject. There is a lot of entertainment to be had by following the careers of those who won the prize and those who didn't. Scientific discovery is not always logical and systematic.
The body is acellular citizenship, in which every cell knows its place, even outside the heart. The engines are self-contained and communicate with the bigger machine. Eugene Rabinowitch, the physical chemist wrote, "no heart could beat, no plant could grow upward, no sensation could speed along a nerve, no thought could flash in the human." The wonder of that has been captured in a single book.
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