The Song of the Cell

Siddhartha Mukherjee is published in 38 languages, has won a Pulitzer amongst many prizes and The Emperor of All Maladies is one of TIME magazine's 100 Best Non-Fiction books of all time. The Observer said about it 'The notion of popular science doesn't come close to describing this achievement. It is literature.' Shot through with a bright thread of experience as a practising physician, his books are grand stories about medicine, science and the human body.

This book is the story of the cell - past, present and future. Since the discovery of the cell in the 1660s and the discovery in the 1850s that most diseases can be traced back to our cells, human beings have been understood as an ecosystem of units that produce exponentially complex structures and effects.

How did we discover these units, and their functions? How did we begin to understand hearts, brains, kidneys as collections of cooperating cells? What are cells anyway? How do they work, and how (why?) do they work together? Why build organs and organisms out of these units?

And could we re-assemble a new kind of human? Could we alter cells to become resistant to diseases? Could we make new humans out of new kinds cells, endowed with novel properties, functions or intentions?

This book is about the building block of life: the cell. Its story is the story of modern medicine.