The Song of the Cell

Title: The Song of the Cell – An Exploration of Medicine and the New Human

Author: Siddhartha Mukherjee

Publisher: Penguin Random House, 2022 (First)

ISBN: 9780670092727

Pages: 473

 

Efforts to understand the fundamental building blocks that make up the complex whole of living organisms was an exercise eagerly taken up by intellectuals in all civilizations of the world. Many intelligent guesses were put forward which could not be evaluated until the physical infrastructure for observing what is happening at the smallest levels could be developed. The invention of telescopes revolutionized astronomy and its counterpart – microscopes – opened up an unknown world before the incredulous researchers. For the first time, they began to discern an underlying uniformity in the composition of various organs within an organism and even across organisms. Following many leads found by experimenters, it was established that cells form the building blocks of life. This book is a chronicle of the discovery that all organisms, including humans, are composed of the basic units called cells and how these cooperative and organized accumulations enable aggregate traits like immunity, sentience, reproduction and cognition. It is also the story of what happens due to dysfunction leading to death and the transformative medicines that are being developed. Siddhartha Mukherjee's other books – the masterpiece ‘The Emperor of All Maladies’ and ‘The Gene’ – were reviewed earlier here.

 

Mukherjee begins by a brief survey of the ancient theories that tried to explain how life functioned. One such was vitalism which postulated a vital force that was present in all living beings as essential for birth of life. Another related idea was preformation. This speculated that microscopic shapes of adult animals reside in sperms. After fertilization with an egg, this is then expanded in size like a balloon surface does. However, cell theory demolished both these by the 1850s. Mankind woke up to a new idea which proved that cells are the basic building blocks of life. All our organs are made of cells that share many similarities like a membrane wall, metabolism, waste processing, nucleus and portals for entry and exit of chemicals. The instructions for creating new cells and for synthesizing proteins are contained in the DNA stored inside the nucleus. Even though the same genome is encoded in each cell, only parts of it are enabled in each organ. The physiology of an organism is the result of chemical reactions happening inside the cells. Likewise, the pathology of an organism is the outcome of another set of reactions which do not contribute to the well-being of the cell and the organism. This cellular targeting is the cause of why medicines succeed in curing the individual. Every potent antibiotic recognizes some molecular component of human cells that is different from a bacterial cell. Penicillin killed the bacterial enzymes that synthesized its cell wall, resulting in bacteria with ‘bullet holes’ in their cell membranes. This helped only because the human cell wall was different from a bacteria’s. But cancer cells share most of the features of normal cells and that’s why destroying them is so difficult and normal tissue is also affected as collateral damage in chemotherapy.

 

Technology has been able to probe deep into outer space and watch the formation and death of star systems in distant galaxies where light itself takes several years to reach. Considering the depth of information – at least, many viable hypotheses – on astronomy, it is astonishing as well as slightly embarrassing that we know very little about cells, on which our body and very life is totally dependent. The author gives a summary of how they originated. The origin of eukaryotic cells – those with a nucleus, like all animal cells – took place around two billion years ago. This is said to be ‘a strange, inexplicable turn for evolution’ (p.71) and also ‘an evolutionary mystery’. It has left only the scarcest of fingerprints of its ancestry or lineage. This is thought to be a black hole at the heart of biology. The growth of cells, by a process called cell division, is also a complex and mysterious operation. It includes a least understood phase called G2, where the division temporarily halts and checks for major errors in DNA duplication that may lead to catastrophic mutations. In such a case, it aborts the process but allows small mutations; otherwise there won’t be any mechanism available for evolution to operate. ‘Black hole’, ‘mysterious’, ‘least understood’, ‘inexplicable’ are all terms that make the opponents of evolution exuberant with joy. But wait, the working of the cell is so complex that they are not even wrong! A serious and fruitful study on cells developed only by mid-twentieth century and the field is still open for revolutionary discoveries.

 

As we read more and more of this book’s contents, we get more and more astonished at the ingenious inner working of the cell. Such is the organization and direction going on at the microscopic level! Frankly speaking, if somebody is led to think that this entire set up must be the creation of a superior intelligence of creator, they can’t be blamed outright. But as you delve deeper, chinks begin to appear and what is most evident is behind the veil is imperfection at every stage of the cellular process. Otherwise, we won’t die, won’t age or even get sick. Perhaps, we may not even be born! The process of blood clotting after a wound illustrates this in detail. Clotting is orchestrated by a special protein called von Willebrand factor (vWf) which circulates in blood as well as located under the cells that line blood vessels. Injury to the vessel caused by the wound exposes the vWf protein. This prompts the other vWf to gather around the injury. A cascade of changes is then launched which leads to the synthesis of another protein called fibrin. This forms a mesh on which the platelets are trapped which forms the clot and stops blood flowing out. So much is perfect design, but the incompetence manifests itself later. As a person ages, cholesterol-rich plaques are formed inside the blood vessels which hang on to the walls of arteries and stick to heart’s valves. When such a plaque accidentally ruptures or breaks, it is unfortunately sensed as a wound. The cascade to heal wounds is then activated. Platelets rush to the site to heal the wound and results in blockade and heart attack. This leads to the conclusion that if life is thought to be the handiwork of a creator, he is certainly intelligent, but not perfect. And this violates the first principle of religion about omnipotence.

 

This book examines each functional subunit of the human body and explains how it functions at the cellular level. The heart, brain, kidney, liver, blood, spleen, pancreas and neurons are handled in sufficient detail. I’m afraid some of it may be a little too thick for readers uninitiated into serious biology like me. However, these chapters are treasure chests of a lot of information and learning. Most developments in cell biology are surprisingly modern. The physiology of T-cells, an essential part of immunity, was identified only half a century ago. The thymus gland which produced it was till then thought to be a vestigial detritus of evolution with no useful function. How the immune system distinguishes between the body’s own cells and foreign invaders is a miraculous process. Mukherjee emphasizes this as it is highly relevant in cancer treatment which is his specialization. The present state of cancer therapy is handicapped by the immune system’s inability to distinguish cancer cells as something hostile to the body’s well-being.

 

The subtitle of the book mentions ‘new human’ whose potentialities are at once exciting and a bit terrifying. This involves genetic manipulation to alter the destiny of humans before birth or when afflicted with disease. Early experiments are now on to search for specific disease-causing genes at the embryo stage and alter them to benign versions before implanting the embryo into the uterus. Needless to say, this is still in its infancy and there’s lot of scope for regulatory supervision. In some cases of cancer in grown up persons, modifying the genome of specific immune cells or therapeutic agents to zero in on the cancer cells and sparing healthy cells is technically feasible. Another aspect of the new-human paradigm is the full scale development of stem cells which is a special kind of cell which can be used to create any type of cell. Normally, a skin cell produces another skin cell and a muscle cell creates a muscle cell. However, a stem cell can be programmed to create any of these. The book records a recent experiment in which a normal cell could be converted to a stem cell. This will greatly assist in developing organs outside the body that can then be used to replace defective ones inside. Mukherjee also stresses on the dynamic equilibrium which pervades at the level of cells which is called homeostasis. Cells die continuously and new ones take their place. Death is a relative balance between forces of decay and rejuvenation. If you tip the balance in one direction, you fall off the edge. Or in other words, the moment you stop growing, you start dying.

 

The book is divided into many parts dealing with fundamental aspects of cells like origin, reproduction, anatomy and metabolism and then goes on to explain each in some detail. Lot of footnotes is included which the author urges us to read carefully. Mukherjee, himself of Indian ethnicity, freely uses Indian philosophical, metaphysical and even mythological symbols to illustrate abstract concepts happening at the level of cells. This is a welcome innovation in books of this genre. This book introduces many advanced ideas which must be well understood by the readers in order to follow the argument intelligently. It must be confessed that this is a bit tedious and there are some pages on which it feels like a text book than a volume of popular science. Still, it must not be missed in one’s reading career. It is also suffused throughout with sublime wonder at the intrinsic functioning of the cell which the readers readily share. However, the illustrations are not at all attractive as many of them are reproduced from the original papers which were intended for a scholarly audience. This should be simplified and made arresting with good graphics in future editions. The author and publisher must seriously consider this suggestion.

 

The book is highly recommended.

 

Rating: 4 Star

Maulana Azad – A Life

Title: Maulana Azad – A Life

Author: S. Irfan Habib

Publisher: Aleph Book Co, 2023 (First)

ISBN: 9789393852182

Pages: 305

 

India was partitioned in 1947 on the demand of the Muslim League to create a separate homeland for the Muslims. Even though the League claimed sole representative status of Muslims to itself, a section of the traditional and conservative Muslims opposed the party and stood alongside the Congress and its leaders. Maulana Abul Kalam Azad was the most prominent among them. He was a show boy of the Congress and was made union minister for education and culture in the Nehru cabinet. This was a little odd as Azad didn’t have any formal education and was a self-taught scholar. He was an expert in Islamic thought with minute knowledge of the Quran and other religious books of the Muslims. There are several biographies on Azad and the idea of this book is to understand both Azad’s Islam and his concept of India. It locates him in terms of the theological, political and philosophical ideas put forward by him. All the more importantly, it also tries to place the Maulana in the present context of Islam as well as nationalism. This book’s author, S. Irfan Habib, is not to be confused with the well-known Marxist historian of the same name belonging to Aligarh Muslim University, even though I had taken this book under this misunderstanding. This author is a historian of science and modern political history. He was the Maulana Azad Chair at the National University of Educational Planning and Administration, New Delhi.

 

Habib briefly illustrates Maulana’s early life. In fact, this is the only part of the book where reliance on the subject’s own words is minimal. In other areas, the author recedes to the background and lets Azad speak for himself. Azad’s ancestors came to India from central Asia in the Sultanate period as courtiers. His father was ‘a learned man whose life was governed by Islam and its moral code’ (p.4). He migrated to Arabia with family a few years before the 1857 rebellion. This was not unusual. Many Muslim families did the same anticipating the end of Mughal rule and the subsequent decline in patronage. Azad was born in Mecca to an Arab mother. The family returned to India and settled in Kolkata when he was seven years old. Ultra-orthodoxy ran in the family for a very long time. Sheikh Jamaluddin was his ancestor contemporary to Emperor Akbar. He refused outright to declare Akbar the Imam i-Adl (the Just Leader) in 1579 due to the emperor’s eclectic religious policy. He too migrated to Mecca claiming the government of the day was with infidels.

 

Azad’s father taught him by selecting teachers who followed his own strict version of religious upbringing. Azad himself remarked that his father was so rigid and that even the slightest departure was infidelity or hypocrisy in his view. This led to the young boy rebelling against his father psychologically, if not physically or by words. The author claims that Azad turned to rationalism, inspired by the writings of Sir Syed Ahmed Khan. This is rather odd. Sir Syed Ahmed was an Islamist radical and his alleged connection to rationalism is a little too farfetched. Later in life, Azad dissociated from this school. Habib hints that Azad indulged in every malice when an opportunity presented itself during his foreign trip to West Asia and Europe when he was only 20 years old. The habits earned in this period include sexual, smoking and alcohol use. Azad has remarked that Europe ‘squeezed out all that could be got without leaving a drop of juice behind’. While leading a married life, he got into an affair with another lady in Mumbai. After this short phase of licentiousness, he embarked on serious journalism and edited the newspapers Al Hilal and Al Balagh. The authorities are reported to have stifled them and put Azad under house arrest for objectionable content. The author does not explain what the point of contention was. This is suspicious.

 

 Habib makes a survey of Azad’s religious belief which is full of contradictions and leaves much to be desired. The reader may also suspect that the ambiguity was let in by design in order to fabricate a façade presentable to the modern, secular world. Maulana Azad was an Islamic scholar with an uncompromising faith in the Quran. He preferred solitude and contemplation, but religion interspersed through all aspects of his life. He abjured the influence of the ulema and relied more on the Quran and Traditions. The author then remarks that his faith in them was close to the Wahhabi/Salafi understanding of Islam. There is a brief primer on Wahhabism here, but elsewhere he claims that Azad opposed it. Moreover, the author accuses Wahhabism of having deformed Islam, but finds justification for equating it to the Catholic Inquisition and witch hunts. Azad’s quest was to promote an Islam which has space for critical thinking and is not committed to taqlid (tradition). Here, he follows Jamaluddin Afghani as an intellectual disciple. But Afghani was convinced that Islam was the religion closest to science and knowledge among all religions. Hence there is no need to reinterpret it to make it compatible with modern science. This leads to the concept that critical thinking and rationality are central to Islam! This is the second contradiction in the author’s argument. Azad also believed that the evolution theory of Darwin agrees with the spirit of the Quran (p.82). The author does not elaborate how. But over the centuries, it lost this spirit and maulvis dominated with their utter ignorance. This book masquerades pan-Islamism as anti-imperialism forgetting that Ottoman imperialism was as evil as its European counterpart to its unfortunate victims. Azad was also influenced by Mohammed Abduh of Egypt who called for a progressive Islam, but considered the first community of Muslims – the prophet and his followers (salaf) – as the role model.

 

We see contradictions in the author’s narrative in almost all he did. Azad’s translation of the Quran simultaneously invoked esoteric Sufi traditions as well as the literalist and canonical textuality of the fiqh tradition. He is categorical in placing the blame for the diversity of interpretations of the Quran on the diverse believers who he said introduced fanciful standards of their own making. Azad believed that the period of enquiry and research in Islamic learning came to an end after four centuries of Hijra – tenth or eleventh centuries CE. Thereafter, interpreters blindly followed the commentary of a learned scholar. Habib remarks that Azad’s antipathy towards British colonial occupation was ‘not confined to the fate of India alone’. This glib comment really means that he was more concerned with the countries in which the British had subdued Muslims rather than what happened to India. This was the spirit behind the Khilafat agitation which had nothing to do with India. And we can safely interpolate that the modern Indian Islamists’ obsession with the freedom of Palestine is a kind of reincarnation of the Khilafat idea. Maulana Azad wanted secularism in India where Muslims were in a minority but demanded Islamic law wherever they are in a majority. His double standard was clearly exposed in his claim that ‘Hindus can revive their self-awareness by national consciousness on the basis of secular nationalism, but it is not possible for Muslims who can seek inspiration for self-awareness only from God and Islam’ (p.123-4). But my greatest shock was reserved for his contempt of idol worship which he thought evil and was ‘a powerful obstacle in the way of a free search for God’ (p.110). With such a blatant disregard for the fundamental feature of Hinduism, how could he expect to coexist with them in a multicultural, secular society? And this man was the central minister for education and culture in free India.

 

 The question about Azad that naturally comes to mind is not that why he had joined the Congress party, but rather why he did not join the Muslim League. The book offers only a partial answer which also comes from Islamic history. The League was formed by educated Muslims who wanted a separate state as a temporary abode like Medina was for the prophet who had to flee Mecca and wanted a foothold in preparing for the re-conquest of his home town in a few years. Likewise, leaders like Jinnah and Iqbal wanted to have Pakistan at first and later to conquer India as a whole. However, radical and uneducated leaders were more concerned about the fate of Muslims who would be left behind in Hindu India after Pakistan is separated. Their idea was to remain in India and latch on to the demographic factor. Muslims had already reached a quarter of the population and in a democratic set up with indiscriminate universal franchise, a lobby of this size voting en masse is quite capable of controlling or even usurping power, particularly if the other side is divided. Leaders like Azad followed this line. Habib does not openly say so, but this is plain reading between the lines. The Maulana saw himself as a national leader from the 1920s and not just as a leader of Muslims only. Though he had absolutely no popular following, he utilized his close proximity to Gandhi and Nehru to reach the highest positions in the party and government. Azad proposed composite nationalism as the ideal for India where Hindus and Muslims should work in unity to fight the British. Early Islam was again projected as the role model. The prophet allied with the Jewish tribes of Medina and united them as one nation against the Quraysh of Mecca. Azad suggested a similar arrangement for India. The author also stops here, lauding the idea. This is nothing but heinous treachery, exploiting the Hindu masses’ ignorance of Islamic history. You can make an Internet search and see for yourself what was the fate of those three Jewish tribes who allied with the early Muslims after the Prophet’s conquest of Mecca. The Banu Qaynuqa and Banu Nadir were expelled from Medina and the Banu Quraysa was slaughtered in cold blood! Azad was a great religious scholar who clearly knew what happened to the Jewish allies but still had the brazenness to suggest it as a model for India.  Azad even opposed the Shuddhi movement of Arya Samaj which was initiated to take back the forcibly converted people in communal riots back to Hinduism. He thought it was ‘not in the national interest’.

 

The book also makes a dedicated effort to paint Azad’s tenure in the Nehru cabinet in a very positive light. Habib claims that the core of Azad’s education policy mirrored the Quranic concept of striking a balance (p.213). He ‘democratized’ the education system with Quranic concepts. However, he did not have much to tinker with in the education policy as Nehru continued to play a key role in most of the policy formulations in educational and scientific matters. He strove for emphasis on primary universal education, but Nehru focused on covering lost ground and catch up with the world in industrial and scientific development by concentrating on higher education. The book includes Azad’s speeches made in meetings as a minister and marvels at the depth of his vision. But these were definitely prepared by secretaries in line with the current government policy. Azad also wanted to impart religious education in schools at public expense.

 

This book is an abject failure as a biography. Practically no personal information is provided. We come to know that Azad was a married man when the author informs us of his emotional distress on his wife’s death while he was lodged in the Ahmed Nagar Fort prison during Quit India Movement. Did he have any children? Again, the readers are in the dark. The author frequently shuttles between the Nehru era and the present to lament at the perceived damages to India caused by the Modi government. It even includes a criticism of the Central Vista Project! But it fails to address a common criticism often levelled against Azad by nationalists – that he invited the king of Afghanistan to invade India and liberate her. Habib does not mention anything about this point and looks very subdued while handling the Khilafat issue, leading one to doubt on the sincerity of the narrative. The Ghubar i-Khatir is the only source used by the author that directly comes from Azad. It was written around 1942 while in prison and includes a collection of letters and miscellaneous topics except politics.

 

The book is recommended.

Rating: 2 Star