Siddhartha Mukherjee in conversation with D.A. Wallach at Live Talks Los Angeles

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Siddhartha Mukherjee in conversation with D.A. Wallach at Live Talks Los Angeles discussing his book, "The Song of the Cell: An Exploration of Medicine and the New Human" This video is from an event taped on November 9, 2022 in Los Angeles. From the author of The Emperor of All Maladies, winner of the Pulitzer Prize, and The Gene, an exploration of medicine and our radical new ability to manipulate cells. Rich with Mukherjee’s revelatory and exhilarating stories of scientists, doctors, and the patients whose lives may be saved by their work, The Song of the Cell is the third book in this extraordinary writer’s exploration of what it means to be human. Siddhartha Mukherjee is the author of The Gene: An Intimate History, a New York Times bestseller; The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer, winner of the 2011 Pulitzer Prize; and The Laws of Medicine. He is the editor of Best Science Writing 2013. Mukherjee is an associate professor of medicine at Columbia University and a cancer physician and researcher. A Rhodes scholar, he graduated from Stanford University, University of Oxford, and Harvard Medical School. He has published articles in many journals, including Nature, The New England Journal of Medicine, Cell, The New York Times Magazine, and The New Yorker. Visit his website. D.A. Wallach is a venture capital investor and an acclaimed recording artist who Fast Company named one of the 100 Most Creative People in Business. Since 2015, D.A. has focused on biotechnology and healthcare, seeking to reinvent medicine through breakthrough start-ups like Beam, Glympse, Doctor on Demand, Devoted Health, and Neuralink. As co-founder and General Partner of Time BioVentures, he brings this experience to a new generation of talented entrepreneurs in the life sciences. His band Chester French, was signed by Interscope Records, where they released two full-length albums. He has toured with Lady Gaga, Weezer, and Blink 182, performed on TV Shows including Jimmy Kimmel Live and Late Night with Jimmy Fallon. In 2011, D.A. stopped touring in order to focus on his other passion, investing. He has since built a parallel career as a venture capitalist, backing a series of industry-defining technology companies including Spotify, SpaceX, Ripple, The Boring Company, and Memphis Meats. He publishes essays on a range of topics on his website, and is the co-founder of the non-profit Franca Fundfor preventive genomics, an advisory board member of No Patient Left Behind, and a member of the Board of Trustees of the Santa Fe Institute. “Part mystery, part adventure story, The Song of the Cell is an irresistible foray into the frontiers of medical science. Animated by Siddhartha Mukherjee’s lively, lucid prose, this volume is a reminder of the power of human ingenuity, and likely to leave readers both enlightened and hopeful.” —Jennifer Egan, author of the Pulitzer Prize winner A Visit from the Goon Squad and the New York Times bestseller The Candy House Mukherjee begins this magnificent story in the late 1600s, when a distinguished English polymath, Robert Hooke, and an eccentric Dutch cloth-merchant, Antonie van Leeuwenhoek looked down their handmade microscopes. What they saw introduced a radical concept that swept through biology and medicine, touching virtually every aspect of the two sciences, and altering both forever. It was the fact that complex living organisms are assemblages of tiny, self-contained, self-regulating units. Our organs, our physiology, our selves—hearts, blood, brains—are built from these compartments. Hooke christened them “cells”. The discovery of cells—and the reframing of the human body as a cellular ecosystem—announced the birth of a new kind of medicine based on the therapeutic manipulations of cells. A hip fracture, a cardiac arrest, Alzheimer’s dementia, AIDS, pneumonia, lung cancer, kidney failure, arthritis, COVID pneumonia—all could be reconceived as the results of cells, or systems of cells, functioning abnormally. And all could be perceived as loci of cellular therapies. In The Song of the Cell, Mukherjee tells the story of how scientists discovered cells, began to understand them, and are now using that knowledge to create new humans. He seduces you with writing so vivid, lucid, and suspenseful that complex science becomes thrilling. Told in six parts, laced with Mukherjee’s own experience as a researcher, a doctor, and a prolific reader, The Song of the Cell is both panoramic and intimate—a masterpiece.