One Cell That Made Us All: LUCA | Dr Siddhartha Mukherjee meets Adam Rutherford (part 2)

Join the award-winning physician for the vivid, thrilling and suspenseful story of cells, taking us from the streets of Restoration London to the birth of a revolutionary new kind of medicine.
The literary heir to Oliver Sacks and Paul Kalanithi, a scientist and doctor with the eloquence and humanitarian sensibility of a philosopher-poet, Dr Siddhartha Mukherjee’s work answers the question of what it means to be alive.
He joins us live on stage in London to tell a story that is both panoramic and intimate, taking us on a journey from the first days of the Scientific Revolution into the present day and beyond: the story of cells.
In the late 1600s, a distinguished English polymath, Robert Hooke, and an eccentric Dutch cloth-merchant, Antonie van Leeuwenhoek, look down their hand-made microscopes. What they see introduces a radical concept that alters both biology and medicine forever. It is the fact that complex living organisms are assemblages of tiny, self-contained, self-regulating units. Our organs, our physiology, our selves, are built from these compartments. Hooke christens them ‘cells’.
The discovery of cells announced the birth of a new kind of medicine. A hip fracture, a cardiac arrest, Alzheimer’s, AIDS, lung cancer - all could be reconceived as the results of cells, or a cellular ecosystem, functioning abnormally. And all could be treated by therapeutic manipulations of cells.
This revolution in cell biology is still in progress: it represents one of the most significant advances in science and medicine.
Rich with stories of scientists, doctors, and the patients whose lives may be saved by their work, don’t miss this extraordinary writer’s exploration of what it means to be human.
Siddhartha Mukherjee is the author of The Gene: An Intimate History, a #1 New York Times bestseller, The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer, winner of the 2011 Pulitzer Prize in general nonfiction, 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 and The New Yorker. He lives in New York with his wife and daughters.
Adam Rutherford is a geneticist, science writer, and broadcaster. He studied genetics at University College London, and during his PhD on the developing eye, he was part of a team that identified the first known genetic cause of a form of childhood blindness. As well as writing for the science pages of The Guardian, he has written and presented many award-winning series and programs for the BBC as well as multiple books.