Dr. Siddhartha Mukherjee still remembers the first cell he cultured: It was an immune cell from a mouse, and he had grown it in a petri dish. As he examined it through a microscope, the cell moved, and Mukherjee was fascinated.
"I could sense the pulse of life moving through it," he says. "You suddenly realize that you're looking at the basic, fundamental unit of life and that this blob that you're seeing under the microscope — this glimmering, refulgent blob of a cell — is the basic unit that connects us and plants and bacteria and archaea and all these other genera and taxa across the entire animal and plant kingdoms."
