In his new book, “The Song of the Cell,” Siddhartha Mukherjee has taken on a subject that is enormous and minuscule at once. Even though cells are typically so tiny that you need a microscope to see them, they also happen to be implicated in almost anything to do with medicine — and therefore almost anything to do with life. Guided by Mukherjee’s granular narration (“As you keep swimming through the cell’s protoplasm …”), I was repeatedly dazzled by his pointillist scenes, the enthusiasm of his explanations, the immediacy of his metaphors. But I also found myself wondering where we were going. What kind of organism might these smaller units add up to?
Mukherjee has an undeniable gift for metaphor, likening an antibody to a “gunslinging sheriff” and a T cell to a “gumshoe detective.” Fatty plaques in the arteries are “precarious mounds of debris alongside highways, accidents waiting to happen.” The essential but underappreciated glial cell was for too long like “a film-star’s assistant stuck perpetually in the shadows of celebrity.” A bacterial protein is so good at making precise changes to the human genome that it’s as if “it can change Verbal to Herbal in the preface to Volume 1 of ‘Samuel Pepys’ Diary’ in a college library containing 80,000 books.”
