Thorndike Press large print nonfiction series.

Regular print edition previously published by: Scribner

Prelude: "The elementary particles of organisms" -- Introduction: "We shall always return to the cell" -- Part one: Discovery -- The original cell: an invisible world -- The visible cell: "Fictitious stories about the little animals" -- The universal cell: "The smallest particle of this little world" -- The pathogenic cell: microbes, infections, and the antibiotic revolution -- Part two: The one and the many -- The organized cell: the interior anatomy of the cell -- The dividing cell: cellular reproduction and the birth of IVF -- The tampered cell: Lulu, Nana, and the transgressions of trust -- The developing cell: a cell becomes and organism -- Part three: Blood -- The restless cell: circles of blood -- The healing cell: platelets, clots, and a "modern epidemic" -- The guardian cell: neutrophils and their kampf against pathogens -- The defending cell: when a body meets a body -- The discerning cell: the subtle intelligence of the T cell -- The tolerant cell: the self, horror antitoxicus, and immunotherapy -- Part four: Knowledge -- The pandemic -- Part five: Organs -- The citizen cell: the benefits of belonging -- The contemplating cell: the many-minded neuron -- The orchestrating cell: homeostasis, fixity, and balance -- Part six: Rebirth -- The renewing cell: stem cells and the birth of transplantation -- The repairing cell: injury, decay, and constancy -- The selfish cell: the ecological equation and cancer -- The songs of the cell -- Epilogue: "Better versions of me"

"From the author of The Emperor of All Maladies, winner of the Pulitzer Prize, and The Gene, a #1 New York Times bestseller, comes his most spectacular book yet, an exploration of medicine and our radical new ability to manipulate cells. Rich with Mukherjee's revelatory and exhilarating stories of scientists, doctors, and the patients whose lives may be saved by their work, The Song of the Cell is the third book in this extraordinary writer's exploration of what it means to be human. Mukherjee begins this magnificent story in the late 1600s, when a distinguished English polymath, Robert Hooke, and an eccentric Dutch cloth-merchant, Antonie van Leeuwenhoek looked down their handmade microscopes. What they saw introduced a radical concept that swept through biology and medicine, touching virtually every aspect of the two sciences, and altering both forever. It was the fact that complex living organisms are assemblages of tiny, self-contained, self-regulating units. Our organs, our physiology, our selves--hearts, blood, brains--are built from these compartments. Hooke christened them "cells". 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 the therapeutic manipulations of cells. A hip fracture, a cardiac arrest, Alzheimer's dementia, AIDS, pneumonia, lung cancer, kidney failure, arthritis, COVID pneumonia--all could be reconceived as the results of cells, or systems of cells, functioning abnormally. And all could be perceived as loci of cellular therapies. In The Song of the Cell, Mukherjee tells the story of how scientists discovered cells, began to understand them, and are now using that knowledge to create new humans. He seduces you with writing so vivid, lucid, and suspenseful that complex science becomes thrilling. Told in six parts, laced with Mukherjee's own experience as a researcher, a doctor, and a prolific reader, The Song of the Cell is both panoramic and intimate--a masterpiece"--

Presenting revelatory and exhilarating stories of scientists, doctors, and the patients whose lives may be saved by their work, the author draws on his own experience as a researcher, doctor, and prolific reader to explore how the discovery of cells created a new kind of medicine based on the therapeutic manipulation of cells