I was fascinated by your description of this evolutionary biologist, Lynn Margulis's case she made in 1967. This notion that the first multicellular organisms may have been actually separate organisms joining forces is amazing. There's a lot of evidence for it, molecular, genetic, and other evidence for it. And we are not only assemblages of cells in a macroscopic sense but our cells are really assemblage of some ancient cell that swallowed a bacterial cell to find an advantage.
Siddhartha Mukherjee is an oncologist, professor, researcher, and biotech entrepreneur. He’s also a writer, and a fine one at that. His first book, “The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer,” won a Pulitzer Prize. His second, “The Gene: An Intimate History,” shot to the top of the New York Times bestseller list and was made into a documentary by Ken Burns. In his latest book, “The Song of the Cell: An Exploration of Medicine and the New Human,” he says our radical new ability to manipulate cells is changing how we treat everything from Alzheimer’s to cancer.
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