Pulitzer prize winning author, Dr Siddhartha Mukherjee’s new book, ‘The Song of the Cell: An Exploration of Medicine and the New Human’, was unveiled in an event that happened on January 18th, 2023 at The Museum of Art and Photography, Bangalore. The unveiling was followed by a fireside chat between Dr Mukherjee and Ms Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw, executive chairperson for Biocon, which shed some light on the future of modern medicine with cell therapies and the possibility of curing previously incurable diseases.
Dr Siddhartha Mukherjee said, “The Song of the Cell understands life at the level of its most fundamental unit: the cell. We are entering a new century of the cell. The fundamental questions in biology and in medicine today can be answered through a better understanding of cells and cell biology.” Dr Mukherjee went on to say that he wrote it at a level that the public can understand.
Ms Mazumdar-Shaw and Dr Mukherjee are co-founders of Immuneel Therapeutics, a start up based in Bangalore, that focuses on cell and gene therapies. They are also trying to make cancer treatment more accessible and affordable in India.
The Biocon executive later wrote in a LinkedIn post, “An immaculately researched book, it inspires the reader to delve deeper into the mysteries of cellular science. It inspires the reader to delve deeper into the mysteries of cellular science. It also inspires the reader to hope for a better future as greater understanding of cellular science is helping unravel the diseases that still afflict us and our ability to treat them. I believe it should be a prescribed textbook in every high school.”
Dr Siddhartha Mukherjee is a cancer physician, biologist and writer who studied at Stanford University, University of Oxford and Harvard Medical School. He won the ‘Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction’ for his 2010 book, ‘The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer.’