Geraldine

“This is the way of life: the many things we do not know until it is too late.”
― Elizabeth Strout, Oh William!

“perhaps the most astonishing feature of multicellularity is that it evolved independently, and in multiple different species, not just once, but many, many times. It is as if the drive to become multicellular was so forceful and pervasive that evolution leapt over the fence again and again. Genetic evidence suggests this incontrovertibly. Collective existence—above isolation—was so selectively advantageous that the forces of natural selection gravitated repeatedly toward the collective. The transformation from single cells into multicellularity was, as the evolutionary biologists Richard Grosberg and Richard Strathmann wrote, a “minor major transition.”
― Siddhartha Mukherjee, The Song of the Cell: An Exploration of Medicine and the New Human

“using a virus that could glue cells together, they fused the B cell with a cancer cell. I am still awestruck by the idea. How did they even think of using the undead to resuscitate the dying? The result was one of the strangest cells in biology. The plasma cell retained its antibody-secreting property, while the cancer cell conferred its immortality. They called their peculiar cell a hybridoma—a, well, hybrid of hybrid and oma, the suffix of carcinoma. The immortal plasma cell was now capable of perpetually secreting only one kind of antibody. We call this antibody of a single type (in other words, a clone), a monoclonal antibody. Milstein and Köhler’s paper was published in Nature in 1975.”
― Siddhartha Mukherjee, The Song of the Cell: How understanding the cell transformed science and our sense of what it means to live.

“I thought as I walked back to the airport—I thought: I know what that man feels like. (Except of course I do not.) But I thought: It’s odd, because on one hand I think I am invisible, but on the other I know what it is like to be marked as separate from society, only in my case no one knows it when they see me. But I thought that about that fat man. And about myself.”
― Elizabeth Strout, Oh William!