71 pages • 2 hours read
Siddhartha MukherjeeThe Song of the Cell: An Exploration of Medicine and the New Human
Siddhartha MukherjeeNonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 2022A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Part 4, Chapter 15Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 4: “Knowledge”
Chapter 15 Summary: “The Pandemic”
Mukherjee begins by noting that, before the COVID-19 pandemic, “it seemed as if the immune system, of all the complex cellular systems in the body, was the one that we understood the best” (245). Researchers were creating drugs that helped make cancer visible to T cells. A fifth of all drugs being approved by the US Food and Drug Administration were related to the immune system. Then came the novel coronavirus, SARS-COV2, which resulted in the COVID-19 pandemic and revealed huge gaps in the understanding of the human immune system. The pandemic brought wealthy and less wealthy countries alike to their knees and had caused at least six million deaths at the time Mukherjee wrote this book.
At the beginning of the pandemic, researchers didn’t understand “what feature of the interaction between SARS-COV2 and human cells enabled this virus to precipitate a global pandemic” (249). A German clinic was one of the first to start uncovering clues when they realized two important things: that asymptomatic/presymptomatic individuals could transmit the virus and that the rate of transmission was exponential. In addition, the world collectively realized thenpredicttable nature of the virus: Some people had mild infections, while others had lethal infections.
The pandemic taught scientists that there’s still much “we don’t know” (253) about the immune system. Cures might have been hindered because science approached the disease based only on known information about the immune system. In addition, virus cells might have novel ways of fooling the immune system into treating them as nonpathogenic.
Part 4, Chapter 15 Analysis
Mukherjee shifts his focus to the COVID-19 pandemic: “It provided a necessary dose of humility” (255). Prior to the pandemic, researchers were like the Demon King Bali from Indian legends. Bali had conquered worlds and believed he was invisible. Researchers, likewise, thought they understood the immune system. In Bali’s arrogance, he granted a wish to Vamana, an avatar of Vishnar, believing that Vamana was harmless. However, Vamana turned into a huge monster and conquered Bali’s kingdom. The legend claims that Vamana “plants his foot on Bali’s head and pushes him into the lower reaches of hell” (249). Here, Vamana is the coronavirus. It morphed into something researchers could barely handle because they assumed they knew what they were dealing with: “Just when we felt that we knew the cell biology of the immune system, when our confidence had crested, scientists’ heads were pushed into the lower reaches of hell” (249). The coronavirus illustrated that researchers still have much to learn about the human immune system.
Another reason that Mukherjee focuses on the pandemic is that its mysteries sit at the center of cell biology. The virus tricks cells into perceiving that it’s not a foreign microbe, particularly in patients with deficient antiviral response systems. Without this system, the body can’t mount a proper defense in the early stages of the infection, which often proves lethal. Many questions remain unanswered, including why the infection is more lethal in men than women and why some people experience long-term effects after recovering from an infection. Mukherjee acknowledges that scientists developed a vaccination in record time, building on decades of knowledge. However, he emphasizes that this “triumphalism fails in the face of more than six million deaths” (255).
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