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Siddhartha Mukherjee on The Song of the Cell
Mukherjee discusses cell biology, medicine, and the reporting behind his third book on #PouredOver.
Quick facts
Medicine · HistoryOn my shelf
The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer
Mukherjee’s Pulitzer Prize-winning debut traces the history of cancer from its earliest documented descriptions in ancient Egypt through the twentieth century’s escalating war against it, weaving together the science of oncology with the personal stories of his own patients as a practicing cancer physician.
Winner of the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction and adapted into a Ken Burns PBS documentary, this is the book that established Mukherjee’s signature form: braiding rigorous medical history with genuine narrative and personal stakes. Reviewers called it a ‘biography’ of the disease for good reason — cancer emerges as something close to a character with its own long, evolving story.
Science · Genetics
The Gene: An Intimate History
A #1 New York Times bestseller tracing the history of genetics from Mendel’s pea plants through the discovery of DNA to CRISPR gene editing, made personal by Mukherjee’s own family history of mental illness across multiple generations, which shapes his exploration of what genes do and don’t determine about us.
The Gene became the basis for another Ken Burns PBS documentary and shows Mukherjee applying the Emperor of All Maladies formula to an even more sprawling subject. The memoir thread — his family’s history with schizophrenia and bipolar disorder — gives the science real emotional weight rather than treating heredity as an abstract puzzle.
Medicine · Biology
The Song of the Cell: An Exploration of Medicine and the New Human
The third book in Mukherjee’s exploration of what it means to be human examines the cell as the fundamental unit of life, tracing the history of cell biology from Robert Hooke’s first glimpse through a microscope to today’s radical new abilities to manipulate cells directly — CAR-T cancer therapies, stem cell treatments, and more.
Named a New York Times Notable Book and winner of the 2023 PROSE Award, this completes an informal trilogy with The Emperor of All Maladies and The Gene — cancer, then the gene, then the cell that brings the gene to life. Mukherjee again anchors the science in specific patients whose lives depend on the research he describes.
Frequently asked questions about Siddhartha Mukherjee’s books
From the bookshelf
“Cancer is a flaw in our growth, but this flaw is deeply entrenched in ourselves. We can rid ourselves of cancer, then, only as much as we can rid ourselves of the processes in our physiology that allow us to grow, to adapt, to recover, to repair.”
— Siddhartha Mukherjee, The Emperor of All Maladies
For more science writing that gives medical history genuine narrative stakes, browse the full shelf.
