But that is, breathtakingly, what Mukherjee pulls off. It takes some nerve to echo the first line of Anna Karenina and infer that the story of a disease is capable of bearing a Tolstoyan treatment.
"Normal cells are identically normal malignant cells become unhappily malignant in unique ways." The yoking of scientific expertise to narrative talent is rare enough, but the literary echoes of The Emperor of All Maladies suggest a desire to go further even than fine, accessible explanation. "The cells look bloated and grotesque, with a dilated nucleus and a thin rim of cytoplasm, the sign of a cell whose very soul has been co-opted to divide and to keep dividing with pathological, monomaniacal purpose."
In this small but typical moment, Mukherjee manages to convey not only a forensically precise picture of what he sees, but a shiver, too, of what he feels. Unlike their discarded host, these cells are "immortal". The leukaemia cells he is examining came from a woman who has been dead for 30 years. And what he gazes at is one of the more sinister mysteries of human – or anti-human – life. But then he describes himself in the simplest of scientific poses, looking into a microscope. In lesser hands, such a passage would leave non-specialist readers bewildered and bored. T hree quarters of the way through his "biography" of cancer, the New York-based oncologist Siddhartha Mukherjee pauses to set the scene in his laboratory, a beehive of esoteric activity and impenetrable jargon.
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