I didn’t like biology when I was a kid. I remember dissecting flatworms in high school and thinking, “What does this have to do with my life?” Of course, the answer is very important, but at the time I didn’t see the connection between the ecology of insects and the ecology of humans. It wasn’t until I started learning about global health that I fully understood and understood the subject.
If I could read cell song If I had read Siddhartha Mukherjee’s books in school, I might have fallen in love with biology much earlier. Not only does he do a great job of explaining things in clear and understandable language; how cells function, but why They are the basis of all life.
Although Mukherjee is a Pulitzer Prize-winning author, he is primarily an oncologist, and his passion for the subject of cell biology comes through on every page. At the beginning of the book, he writes, “I love to look at cells the way gardeners look at plants: not just the whole, but also the parts within the parts.” The results are as good as his two previous books. emperor of all diseasesthis is about cancer; geneyou can probably guess the subject.
cell song It starts by helping us understand the evolution of life. When life first appeared on Earth, it was in the form of single-celled organisms. (important questions Another great book that tackles this topic is written by Nick Lane. ) Billions of years later, the human body has hundreds of highly specialized cells that all work in harmony with each other to help us grow and continue to function throughout adulthood. Mukherjee brilliantly explains how every malfunction, every disease and outcome of aging, ultimately boils down to something wrong with one of these cells.
Nearly two centuries after two German scientists first proposed the cell theory (the idea that all living things are made up of cells), researchers are now using the building blocks of life to treat disease. Our understanding of how to manipulate it is still in a relatively early stage. Mukherjee spends a lot of time researching its history and current situation. cell therapywhich involves taking cells out, growing new cells, and then putting them back in.
Currently, the most successful and best-known type of cell therapy involves stem cells. Unlike most cells in the human body, stem cells are a blank canvas.Think of them like this potential, has the ability to become almost every cell in the body. When a fetus first forms in the womb, almost its entirety is made up of this blank canvas. By adulthood, the number of stem cells decreases significantly, but the ones you do have play an important role in replacing damaged cells. As you grow older, they grow older with you. Over time, DNA becomes damaged and becomes less effective. This means it will take longer for the tissue to replenish. (If you’re at an age where recovery from injury takes much longer than before, aging stem cells should take some of the blame.)
Scientists have long been excited about the therapeutic potential of stem cells. The hope is that one day we will be able to use stem cells to restore cells to a younger, healthier state. I’m still optimistic that it will happen eventually, but I think my initial excitement was a little too optimistic. For example, researchers had a grand vision of repairing fractured vertebrae using neural stem cells that would regenerate the spinal cord. It hasn’t worked yet, and there is only one form of stem cell therapy that has been successful at this point. It is a hematopoietic stem cell transplant containing blood cells.
The history of stem cell transplants is surprising, moving, and heartbreaking. Mukherjee devotes an entire chapter to this subject. In 1963, a team at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, affectionately known here in Seattle as Fred Hutch, learned that the most effective way to treat leukemia was to destroy cancer cells with chemotherapy. I was there. But there was a problem. This process destroyed the immune system.
If leukemia is left untreated, it can usually lead to death. So they came up with a bold solution. Doctors give patients chemotherapy and then administer stem cells from a donor to rebuild their entire immune system from scratch. When this procedure was first performed, it was extremely dangerous and the first patient died. Mukherjee interviewed several nurses who work in Fred Hutch’s leukemia unit. It’s hard to read their stories of watching patients, many of them children, struggle to recover after surgery.
Slowly but surely, over time, both the surgery itself and ongoing survival rates improved. Hematopoietic stem cell transplantation is now a common treatment for leukemia and other cancers such as multiple myeloma. And research is underway to see if it can be used to treat deadly diseases such as HIV and sickle cell disease.
The road to effective cell therapy has been long and arduous, but I am optimistic that our new understanding of cells will soon lead to major advances. As Mukherjee explains in his book, we are just beginning to understand how cells interact. “We can name cells and even cellular systems, but we have yet to learn how they work. song I am a cell biologist,” he wrote. We still don’t understand how cells work together to create a consistent melody that powers the human body. As he so elegantly puts it, I believe that once you learn these songs, you will unlock innovative new treatments that will change the way we think about medicine.
If I could go back in time and tell my teenage self how biology relates to my life, I would say this. “We all get sick at some point.” We all have loved ones who get sick at some point. Understanding what is happening in the moment and feeling optimistic that things will get better requires a basic knowledge of the building blocks of life. Mukherjee understands that “to find the center of normal physiology or disease, we must first look at the cell.” The world of medicine is progressing very rapidly. cell song This helps us understand how far we have come in achieving each breakthrough.