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Loading... Het lied van de cel een onderzoek naar de geneeskunde en de nieuwe mens (edition 2022)by Siddhartha Mukherjee
Work InformationThe Song of the Cell: An Exploration of Medicine and the New Human by Siddhartha Mukherjee
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Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. No current Talk conversations about this book. Dudes. Have you ever thought about the fact that you are made entirely of cells? And somehow they coordinate their individual activities so you can grow, heal, think, live, and die? Holy shit! In this very readable and fascinating book, Mukherjee weaves together basic cell biology, the history of how we learned what we know so far about cells, his own experience as an oncologist and researcher, and his own personal life experiences. Somehow he keeps all the threads in order and after finishing this book, the reader has a pretty well-rounded understanding of what is going on with our crazy cells, what we still don't understand, and the many people who got us to this point. As a cancer person, this really helped me understand my own treatment (I finally get exactly what it is that neutrophils do and how the CDK4/6 inhibitors I took in my first and second lines of treatment really work!). Even non-cancer people can prepare to have their minds blown. Do you understand diabetes? The immune system? How a sperm and egg turn into a person? Maybe you think you do, but I bet you will learn a few things if you dig into this book. I read Mukherjee's Pulitzer-prize winning history of cancer, The Emperor of All Maladies, and really liked it but found his prose sometimes a bit too flowery for my taste. In The Song of the Cell, he keeps the same novelistic writing style, but (for the most part) reins in the overly florid metaphors. This book was just great. Highly recommended. ( ) Mukherjee’s books are always a pleasure. Learning about everything, from the experiments that were done to determine the functions of the various organelles of the cell ,to the creation of genetically modified human embryos turned out to be really entertaining. Love the Hindi stories that are skillfully woven in as well The information in this book was really interesting and well presented. However it is information dense and I would recommend reading it slowly, not only to take it in, but to prevent yourself from getting burned out by it. I was reading it on a deadline and pushed through it which left me feeling a bit overwhelmed with the material at times. It is very readable and easy to understand so don't be put off by the science. Just take your time with it.
The rise of the ‘new human’ – how stem cells are revolutionising medicine. Siddhartha Mukherjee's brilliant The Song of The Cell explains how these building blocks will upend our understanding of life itself. very cell in your body, from toenail to brain, comes from a single original cell: the fertilized egg that was you at conception. So every different organ and tissue in the human body can in principle be produced by an embryonic cell, or stem cell. That being the case, why don’t we grow new limbs after injury, like salamanders and starfish do? Alas, our cells don’t always do what we’d wish. At least, not yet. The prospect of the kind of “cellular engineering” that might make such therapies possible is one among many themes of The Song of The Cell, whose author, the oncologist Siddhartha Mukherjee, previously wrote the bestselling The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer (2010). Cancer itself is a recurring thread here too, being another way in which our cells can rebel against our hopes and desires. (There are some particularly moving scenes at the bedside of a friend and patient of the author’s.) What can make the disease so intractable, he explains, is that a single tumour can contain cells that have mutated in different ways, so that it is “an assemblage of nonidentical diseases”. So even novel therapies that sequence a tumour’s genome are not guaranteed to succeed. No one knows how the planet’s first biological cell – the shared ancestor of all living things, from magic mushrooms to Liz Truss – constructed itself, billions of years ago. But somehow a bunch of proto-genetic material surrounded itself with a protective bubble and life got going. Later, single cells decided it might be worth getting together – perhaps huddling for defence, though again no one really knows – and so multicellular organisms such as shrubs and lizards were eventually made possible. As Mukherjee explains, cells have evolved into exquisite nanobots, packed with all sorts of machinery for energy production, replication, and – in the case of immune cells – hunting and killing. Immunotherapy – the re-education of a patient’s own immune cells, the better to target cancer or other disease – is one of the cutting-edge medical interventions that really interest Mukherjee, and he relates some fascinating case studies of how it can work or fail. The problem is often that the supercharged immune cells go after other innocent organs (say, the liver) as well as the enemy. In a short but excellent chapter on the covid-19 pandemic, meanwhile, Mukherjee explains the especially vicious cellular effects of the Sars-Cov-2 virus’s hijacking and subverting of the immune system itself. Still it isn’t known how exactly this is done. “The monotony of answers is humbling, maddening,” the author writes. “We don’t know. We don’t know. We don’t know.” What we do know, however, is already impressive. The fact that living tissues are made from cells was first discovered only in the late 17th century, by microscope-building investigators such as Robert Hooke and the Dutch cloth merchant Antonie Van Leeuwenhoek. (Hooke called them “cells” because their structure reminded him of monks’ rooms.) Two hundred years later, it was still common for surgeons who dropped a scalpel on a blood-and-pus-soaked floor simply to wipe it off on their gowns for reuse. (Pus was thought to have splendid healing powers.) And now, a mere 150 years later, we can rewrite the DNA inside cells to cure some kinds of vision or hearing loss. By engaging in such medical magic, Mukherjee argues that we are in a sense creating “new humans”, which might be thought a slight overstatement, but one cannot begrudge him his delight in his chosen science. Indeed, the subject of the cell is so vast in his hands – covering not only the anatomy of single cells, but also everything from IVF and heart attacks to battlefield medicine, deep-brain stimulation for depression, the Thalidomide disaster, the discovery of insulin, and gene-edited babies – that he has effectively attempted to write a book about the entirety of human biology and modern medicine. The guiding metaphor of “new humans”, as we allegedly shall be once immunological and genetic engineering becomes routine, is therefore structurally useful if not altogether convincing. It is fortunate, then, that Mukherjee he is such an engaging writer, alert to both nanoscopic beauty and the potential deceptions of metaphor. After a particularly gruelling hospital episode, he comments: “Ever since that evening, I never use the word ‘bloodbath’ casually.” The most immediate parts of the book, indeed, are the periodic case studies from the author’s clinical practice, written with compassionate warmth and humour, and the personal glimpses into an ordinary scientific life and the dedication that goes with it. At one lovely point, he relates how he spends Monday mornings alone in a darkened room at his hospital, looking at blood samples under a microscope. It’s his favourite time of day. “I love looking at cells, in the way a gardener loves looking at plants.” He also has an amusing habit of describing British places (Oxford, Oldham) as interminably rainy or foggy purgatories in which scientists must nonetheless doggedly pursue the truth, with wry asides at “the English habit of deadly euphemism” he encountered as a student. One scientific mentor, he relates, had a habit of reacting to an idea he thought ludicrous by calling it “subtle”. Mukherjee remembers: “At lab meetings, I must confess, I was often rather subtle.” In a more flattering sense of that term, he still is. AwardsDistinctionsNotable Lists
The discovery of cells--and the reframing of the human body as a cellular ecosystem--announced the birth of a new kind of medicine based on the therapeutic manipulations of cells. A hip fracture, a cardiac arrest, Alzheimer's, dementia, AIDS, pneumonia, lung cancer, kidney failure, arthritis, COVID--all could be viewed as the results of cells, or systems of cells, functioning abnormally. And all could be perceived as loci of cellular therapies. In The Song of the Cell, Mukherjee tells the story of how scientists discovered cells, began to understand them, and are now using that knowledge to create new treatments and new human No library descriptions found. |
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Google Books — Loading... GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)571.60Natural sciences and mathematics Life Sciences, Biology Physiology and related subjects Cell biologyLC ClassificationRatingAverage:
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