'We are a deeply flawed species, but a deeply good species too,' writes jeffreykluger
. Physician, immunologist, biologist, and an assistant professor of medicine at Columbia University Medical Center, Mukherjee has devoted his life not only to his writing, but to research. He sees the practice of medicine as its own act of mercy, something that is unique to—and a credit to—our often-fractious species.
“I did my medical training in reverse,” he says. “I was first trained as an immunologist and then a biologist. That was very critical, because it allowed me not just to think about patients, but to think in terms of what the range of possibilities [to treat them] was scientifically.” Mukherjee structures much of his book in a way that does focus on the individual notes of the cellular song, devoting chapters to The Healing Cell ; The Discerning Cell ; The Contemplating Cell ; The Renewing Cell ; and inevitably The Selfish Cell . There is a danger of anthropomorphizing, or at least aggrandizing, cells in all of this—and Mukherjee is O.K. with that.
From all of this, Mukherjee concedes, “It does sound as if cells have agency. It’s not the agency that you and I have [in the form of] sentience. But I think they do have agency in the sense that they’re autonomous. They receive signals, they integrate signals. They then process those signals and send out more signals. They have a desire to survive.”
And he answers that question too. “We aren’t bacteria because at some point in time evolution came to the nonconscious conclusion that in fact, agglomerations of organisms were very effective. In some selected environments—like a New York City apartment—it helpsto be a bacterium. Multicellular organisms can gather food, they can gather information, they can contemplate. Multi-cellular organisms are extraordinarily successful, too.
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