The Song of the Cell

Physician and oncologist Siddhartha Mukherjee tells how humans came to understand the cell, and how that knowledge is now being used in medicine. He begins in the late 1600s with Robert Hooke, who coined the word cell after looking at cork under a microscope, and the Dutch cloth merchant Antonie van Leeuwenhoek. Their finding that complex organisms are built from tiny self-regulating units opened a medicine in which conditions from lung cancer and AIDS to dementia and kidney failure can be understood as cells working abnormally. Told in six parts and drawing on Mukherjee's own work as a researcher and doctor, the book also takes up stem cells in regenerative medicine. It won the 2023 Chautauqua Prize.

Bill Gates included it in his 2023 holiday list of recommended books.