The history of the cell, cell therapy, gene therapy, and more | Siddhartha Mukherjee

**Peter Attia** (0:11)
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Now, without further delay, here's today's episode.
My guest this week is Siddhartha Mukherjee. Sid was a previous guest on episode number 32 way back, boy, December 2018, I believe. Sid is a cancer researcher and a cancer physician practicing oncologist. He's an assistant professor of medicine at Columbia University and a staff cancer physician at the Columbia University NYU Presbyterian Hospital. He also happens to be a luminary author. He's written four books, The Emperor of All Maladies, The Laws of Medicine, The Gene and his most recent book, The Song of the Cell, An Exploration of Medicine and The New Human. In my first podcast with Sid, we mostly discussed The Emperor of All Maladies, The Biography of Cancer, a book that won him the Pulitzer Prize.
In this podcast, we primarily discuss his most recent book, The Song of the Cell. This is a book that I just devoured, and I wouldn't have thought I could find a book about the history of the cell so interesting. But as you can tell by the fact that we're doing this podcast, I clearly did. Talk about so many things that I think to try to do it in the intro, we do it no justice, but we go everything really from the evolutionary drive to go from single cell to multi cell organisms, all the way up to cell therapy, gene therapy, CRISPR, of course, all these things. We talk a lot about Sid's writing process as well, given that he's such a prolific writer, and frankly, some very personal things, including his decision to open up about his own depression in his writing.
It's always a pleasure for me to sit down and talk with Sid, especially when we can do it like this and record it. Without further delay, please enjoy my conversation with Sid Mukherjee.
Hey, Sid. So great to see you again. It's been a long time since we've seen each other in person. The last time we sat down for one of these, of course, it was in person and we didn't have video. Now we've got video, but we're in a different time zone. Congratulations on the success of your most recent book. For folks listening or viewing, give us a sense of where this book fits into the prior work. We talked at great length about one of your books, The Emperor of All Maladies, but there was a book that followed that and then of course there's this. Maybe put this in the context of those books.

**Siddhartha Mukherjee** (3:02)
This is part of a trilogy and possibly a cortex that I'm working on broadly called The Life Series.
The attempts of these books is to try to explain and understand how we understand life and how we're manipulating life, living things, obviously, particularly humans.
In an odd way, the place to begin to some extent, the trilogy right now, so the first book, The Emperor of All Analogies, the second, The Gene, and now, The Song of the Cell, would be to probably start with the gene. Now, the gene being the least unit or the smallest unit of information, and then realize as you end the gene that genes which are encoded in DNA, the molecule DNA, are lifeless. They don't have any autonomous life. A gene is just a molecule, it's a chemical, and it's the cell that brings it to life. And without the cell, there would be nothing. All of that code would be useless. I liken the human genome or any genome to a score of music, but a score is lifeless. There's no music in a score, it's just the code. You need a musician to bring it to life, and the cell is that musician, hence the title of the book, The Song of the Cell. The cell brings it to life. So the second book to some extent is the cell.
And then the third book, bizarrely enough, is the first book. It's sort of like Star Wars, the prequel to the sequel to the prequel, where you learn about what happens when cells become aberrants. So that would be one way to read the series of books. Start with the gene, move on to the second unit, which is the cell, and finally end up with the dysfunctional aberrant cell and what happens to it when its genes go haywire.