The Song of the Cell: An Exploration of Medicine and the New Human

⚡️ 11 Quotes from the book

“A life within a life. An independent living being—a unit—that forms a part of the whole. A living building block contained within the larger living being.”

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“This, rather, is the story of how the concept of the cell, and our comprehension of cellular physiology, altered medicine, science, biology, social structures, and culture.”

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“Cancer, in short, is cell biology visualized in a pathological mirror.”

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“If a single cell’s DNA could be stretched out straight, like a wire, it would measure six and a half feet. And if you could do that for every cell in the human body and laid all of that DNA end to end, it would stretch from the Earth to the sun and back again more than sixty times.”

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“The life cycle for a multicellular organism, in short, could be reconceived as a rather simple back-and-forth game between meiosis and mitosis.”

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“In one of the most intriguing attempts, carried out at the University of Minnesota in 2014, a group of researchers led by Michael Travisano and William Ratcliff made a multicellular being evolve from a unicellular organism.”

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“Vaccination, more than any other form of medical intervention—more than antibiotics, or heart surgery, or any new drug—changed the face of human health.”

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“Once we teach our innate immune cells to attack malignant cells in humans, we will have invented an entirely new mode of cell therapy that harnesses inflammation. Perhaps we might describe it, metaphorically, as a pox on cancer.”

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“To understand the biology of humans, then, we need to understand organs. And to understand organs, their dysfunctions in disease, and the possibility of rebuilding them, we must understand the biology of the cells that make them work.”

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“Cellular engineering has already allowed us to rebuild parts of humans with reengineered cells. As our understanding of this arena grows, new medical and ethical conundrums will arise, intensifying and challenging the basic definition of who we are, and how much we wish to change ourselves.”

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“When he does get transplanted, he, too, will cross a border. He will become a new human, built out of his own reengineered cells. He will be a new sum of new parts.”

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