I didn’t like biology as a child. In high school, I was able to crack a flatworm and ask myself, “What does this mean for my life?” I remember thinking. Of course, the answer is very good – but at the time I did not see the connection between worm biology and man. It was only after I started learning about global health that I began to fully understand and appreciate it.
If I could read Cell song By Siddhartha Mukherjee at school, I may have fallen in love with biology much earlier. He does a great job explaining not only in clear language how cells work but why? They are the foundation of all life.
Although he is a Pulitzer Prize-winning author, Mukherjee is primarily an oncologist whose passion for the subject of cellular biology comes through on every page. At the beginning of the book, he writes, “I like to see cells the way a gardener likes plants—not just as a whole, but also the parts within them.” The result is as good as the two previous books: The emperor of all MaladisIt is about cancer, and GeneMaybe you can guess the subject.
Cell song It starts with helping you understand the evolution of life. When life first appeared on our planet, it was in the form of single-celled organisms. (An important question (Here’s another great book that explores this topic by Nick Lane.) Over billions of years, the human body is home to hundreds of highly specialized cells, all of which work together to help you grow and survive into adulthood. Mukherjee does a great job of explaining how every problem—every disease or consequence of aging—ultimately comes down to a problem with one of these cells.
Although it’s been two centuries since two German scientists first proposed the cell theory—the idea that all living things are made of cells—our understanding of how we can use life’s building blocks to treat disease is still in its infancy. Mukherjee spends a lot of time exploring history and the present Cell therapyIt involves taking out your cells, growing new ones, and then putting them back in.
Currently, the most successful and well-known type of cell therapy involves stem cells. Unlike most cells in the human body, stem cells are a blank canvas. Think of them Capacity, the ability to be any cell in the body. When a fetus first forms in the womb, it is made almost entirely of these blank canvases. By the time you’re an adult, there are very few of them – but the stem cells you do have play a key role in replacing damaged cells. They grow old with you. Their DNA becomes damaged over time and they become less effective, meaning your tissue takes longer to replenish. (If you reach an age where it takes longer than ever to recover from injury, your aging stem cells deserve some of the blame.)
Scientists have long been excited about the therapeutic potential of stem cells. The hope is that one day, we can use stem cells to restore your cells to a younger, healthier state. I’m still hopeful that will eventually be the case, but I think the initial excitement is a bit overly optimistic. For example, researchers have visions of repairing broken spines with neural stem cells that regrow spinal cord. That has not yet been resolved, and to date, there is only one type of successful stem cell therapy: a hematopoietic stem cell transplant involving blood cells.
The story of stem cell transplantation is equal parts fascinating, inspiring, and heartbreaking. Mukherjee has devoted an entire chapter to the subject. In the year In 1963 at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center – as Fred Hatch is affectionately known here in Seattle – he discovered that the most effective way to treat leukemia was to kill the cancer cells with chemotherapy. But there was one problem: the procedure destroyed the body’s immune system.
If left untreated, leukemia is usually fatal. So they came up with a bold solution. After a patient’s chemotherapy, doctors give them stem cells from a donor to rebuild their entire immune system from scratch. When the procedure was first performed, it was very dangerous, and the first patients died. Mukherjee interviewed some of the nurses working in the leukemia wing at Fred Hatch. Their stories of watching their patients—most of them children—struggle to recover after the procedure are hard to read.
Slowly but surely, over time, both the operation itself and the rate of continued survival have improved. Today, hematopoietic stem cell transplantation is a common treatment for leukemia and other cancers such as myeloma. Research is underway to see if it can be used to treat deadly diseases such as HIV and sickle cell disease.
The journey to effective cell therapies has been long and arduous, but I am hopeful that our new understanding of cells will soon lead to major breakthroughs. As Mukherjee explains in his book, we are only beginning to understand how cells communicate with each other. “We can even name cells and cell systems, but we have yet to learn Songs Cell Biology,” he wrote. We still don’t know how cells work together to create the coordinated rhythm that powers the human body. I believe that once we learn those songs – as he so beautifully puts it – we will unlock revolutionary new treatments that will change the way we think about medicine.
If I could go back and tell my teenage self how biology relates to life, I would say: We all get sick at some point. All of our loved ones get sick. In order to understand what’s going on in those moments and feel optimistic that things will get better – you need a basic knowledge of the building blocks of life. “To find the normal physiological or diseased heart, one must first look at the cells,” Mukherjee understood. The world of medicine moves very quickly, and Cell song It helps you appreciate how far we’ve come to achieve each milestone.