It took centuries for scientists to get a complete picture of the cell, the tiny units of life that make up every living thing. Flash forward, and doctors are increasingly working at the cellular level, transplanting or altering individual cells to find treatments for diseases like cancer and diabetes.
Siddhartha Mukherjee, a Pulitzer Prize-winning author and cancer physician, believes this new understanding of cellular medicine could lead to medical breakthroughs—ways to repair our cells, or someday even enhance them. In his latest book, “The Song of the Cell,” Dr. Mukherjee also warns of ethical gray areas that could result from cellular medicine’s potential to augment human cells.
We are changing the process by which we effect repair and rejuvenation by transplanting stem cells. And so what I call a ‘new human’ is the idea that, by manipulating cells, we’re manipulating humans.
Imagine a person walking around with an electrode in their brain. Imagine a person who’s been transplanted with cells that have changed the capacity to make insulin.
We are doing this in a manner that to me seems extraordinarily futuristic. A ‘new human’ is not Keanu Reeves in a black muumuu; a ‘new human’ is the kind of person we produce when we manipulate your T-cells or when we put electrodes in your brain, when we combine prostheses with cellular prostheses.
