Mukherjee weaves history, biology into story of humans
Books, Siddhartha Mukherjee says, just tumble out of him, like fluffy towels and clean socks cascade out of a dryer at the end of the cycle. And it’s a good thing, because it’s not as if the man has a lot of idle time to spare.
Mukherjee — an assistant professor of medicine at Columbia University, an oncologist and a researcher of cancer treatments — sees patients, runs a blood cancers research lab, co-parents two children, writes deeply researched features for The New Yorker, helps run four biotechnology and health care companies he co-founded, and throws elaborate dinner parties with his wife, sculptor Sarah Sze. Oh, and even as he was completing medical school at Harvard University, he trained as an Indian classical music vocalist and continues to perform with a jazz fusion band.
And yet he insists that it is not difficult to make space to write books, exhaustive though they might be: His latest, “The Song of the Cell: An Exploration of Medicine and the New Human,” thuds in at 480 pages.
“The process of writing a book is organic — it comes out of something inside me,” he said. “It’s a compulsion. It’s not like I’m writing a book because I’m writing a book. It’s because I think that we need to know about this. We need to think about this. We need to understand this. We, as in the broader public.”
And when an idea has captured him in this way, the book pours forth. “There’s no stopping. In fact, the books have to be generally edited downward, rather than upward because there’s too much in them.”
Recently published, “The Song of the Cell” is his fourth book, the third that weaves history and biology into a story about who we are. The first was “The Emperor of All Maladies,” a biography of cancer that won the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for nonfiction.
That book led into “The Gene: An Intimate History,” published in 2016, which tackled what we know about genes and how much of our health and behavior they determine, and how. Together with “The Song of the Cell,” and a book he’s writing now, it will add up, he says, to “the life quartet: cancer, the gene, the cell and I’m not even sure what the last piece of this is.”
Then, having insisted he doesn’t yet know what the last book will be since it’s not done, he hurries on: It’s about “the end of life, the extension of life, metabolism, what happens as we near the end and how we can potentially extend the end. It’s about compassion, and it’s about feeling, it’s about my father’s death, and it’s about watching people die — what’s graceful as we end life, and at what point in time.”
The first three books of what he’s calling the quartet delve deeply into the history of scientific inquiry; they are all “fundamentally about understanding the units that organize our life. As we understand those units we begin to imagine the human body as accumulations of cells, as accumulation of genes.” He calls that one of the most important ideas in human history.
Throughout “The Song of the Cell,” Mukherjee discusses what were once radical new technologies and the patients on whom they were pioneered — the first in vitro fertilization, the first stem cell transplants, the first efforts to address pathologies by altering the cells that cause them — and the fierce ethical debates they provoked when they were first attempted.
It’s a repeating process, he said. “New technologies in the world: Some will be unpalatable to us because of what we believe in as humans. Some will become palatable to us because we think they alleviate forms of suffering.” The issue is, he says, that our understanding of suffering is constantly changing.
“There are no guiding principles, because science moves so quickly. Even if we make up some, scientists and sciences and medicine will come up with some things that challenge those governing principles.”
He said his role is simply to show how these situations have been handled historically. But what the book makes clear, by its end, is that as each once-radical process normalizes, as we grow more comfortable with something that initially provokes alarm or horror, the public debate dies away. By extension, it feels plausible that gene-editing therapies may seem normal in just a few years.