From One Cell
A Journey into Life's Origins and the Future of Medicine
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3.0 • 2 Ratings
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
“Insightful and erudite.”—Adrian Woolfson, Wall Street Journal
Inside the quest to unlock the mysteries of development—and find the key to transforming our future.
Each of us began life as a single cell. From this humble origin, we embarked on a risky journey fraught with opportunities for disaster. Yet, amazingly, we reached our destination intact, emerging as dazzlingly complex, exquisitely engineered assemblages of trillions of cells. This metamorphosis constitutes one of nature’s most spectacular yet commonplace magic tricks—and one of its most coveted secrets. In From One Cell, physician and researcher Ben Stanger offers a breathtaking glimpse into what scientists are discovering about how life and the body take shape, and how these revelations stand to revolutionize medicine and the future of human health.
In vivid prose, Stanger leads readers on a gripping odyssey retracing this universal, yet unremembered, rite of passage. Through the eyes of the scientists unraveling development’s riddles in experiments as painstaking as they are inventive, we confront fascinating puzzles: how does the plethora of different tissues that compose our bodies arise from a single source? How do cells know what they are meant to become—skin or bone, blood or muscle—when all carry the same set of genetic instructions? Once a cell starts developing down one path, can it change its mind, or is its destiny irrevocably sealed?
As Stanger shows us, the answers to these questions may at last empower us to solve some of our most persistently confounding medical challenges, from cancer to cognitive decline to degenerative disease. Recognizing tumors as evil doppelgangers of the embryo points the way toward new, more targeted cancer therapies. Learning how cells choose their identities and find their way in space could unlock lifesaving breakthroughs in regenerative medicine. The possibilities are extraordinary.
Popular science at its best, From One Cell celebrates the power and beauty of understanding our collective beginnings.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
"How does an entire animal... arise from a single cell?" asks Stanger, a professor of medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, in his superb debut. Offering a thorough overview of how single-celled zygotes grow into complex organisms, Stanger profiles researchers whose experiments have contributed to the current scientific understanding of development, starting with English naturalist Robert Hooke's discovery of cells in 1665 by examining cork under a magnifying glass. Also discussed are French biologists François Jacob and Jacques Monod's tests in the late 1950s on E. coli bacteria, which found cells acquire specialized roles through the regulation of genes, and German embryologist Hilde Mangold's 1921 grafts of newt embryos, which revealed that "cells ‘talk' to one another during development." Cell research, Stanger contends, holds promise for devising new medical treatments, including the ability to repair damaged nerves after spinal injuries or to disrupt cancer cells' ability to communicate with and control other cells. The scientific explanations are enlightening and related with helpful analogies (Stanger suggests that each cell contains an organism's full genome for the same reason actors work from complete scripts, instead of only their own lines), showcasing the surprising and impressive abilities of cells. Readers will marvel at this stimulating and comprehensive deep dive.
