Biographer of the Human Body: Siddhartha Mukherjee’s Latests Book is an ‘Outstanding Addition to His Oeuvre’

You could mistake him for a professional playing in a Jazz fusion band or Indian classical music concert. But those are only his side gigs. He is actually an oncologist and an associate professor of medicine at Columbia University, but better known as a Pulitzer Prize-winning author.

More precisely, Siddhartha Mukherjee is a brilliant biographer of the human body. His seminal works include, ”The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer” and “The Gene: An Intimate History.” His latest magnum opus, “The Song of the Cell: An Exploration of Medicine and the New Human,” is part of the trilogy that the New York Times says, “weaves history and biology into a story about who we are.”

“The Song of the Cell” was published on Oct. 15.

His 2010 book “The Emperor of All Maladies” not only won the Pulitzer Prize but also was made into a three-part television documentary by Ken Burns. His next book, “The Gene: An Intimate History,” published in 2016, according to the Times, is about what we know about genes and how much of our health and behavior they determine, and how. Together with “The Song of the Cell,” and a book he’s writing now, will add up, to what Mukherjee told the Times, “the life quartet: cancer, the gene, the cell and I’m not even sure what the last piece of this is.”

All his books, he told the Times, are “fundamentally about understanding the units that organize our life. As we understand those units we begin to imagine the human body as accumulations of cells, as accumulation of genes.”

What Mukherjee “writes is important, and he does so in an elegant, engaging fashion. This is a moving, deeply humane book.”

Meanwhile, the Kirkus review says “The Song of the Cell” is “another outstanding addition to the author’s oeuvre,” and a “luminous journey into cellular biology.” In the book, the 52-year-old and 2003 MacArthur Fellow “punctuates his scientific explanations with touching, illustrative stories of people coping with cell-based illnesses, tracking how the knowledge gleaned from those cases contributed to further scientific advancement,” Kirkus says.

Los Angeles Review of Books attests that what Mukherjee “writes is important, and he does so in an elegant, engaging fashion. This is a moving, deeply humane book.”

In a similar vein, the Publisher’s Weekly opines that Mukherjee’s “ideas about the near future of medicine (one in which medicine will “perhaps even create synthetic versions of cells, and parts of humans”) are both convincing and inspiring, and woven throughout his narrative are accessible explanations of cell biology and immunology. This is another winner from Mukherjee.”

The popularity of Mukherjee’s craft is such that even though the subject matter of his books is not exactly the kind talked about in the cocktail circuit, he is the toast of celebrity circles. In 2016, he and his wife Sarah Sze, an internationally acclaimed sculptor were featured in Vogue. They have two daughters Leela, 16, and Aria, 12.

Of course, Mukherjee has his detractors in the medical research world, who consider his work simplistic and even “defies rational analysis.” His 2016 article in the New Yorker on“The Gene” was criticized as “misrepresenting foundational ideas.” However, the Times quoted Bert Vogelstein, a pioneer in oncology research saying, “I think the ability to explain complicated issues to people who are not experts in the field is a true talent and a tremendous service for both the public and for scientists.”