From the pioneering days of IVF to modern gene editing, Siddhartha Mukherjee’s ambitious book explores how far we have come in understanding the cell – and how far we still have to go
In less than 50 years, the IVF process has gone from pioneering to commonplace
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The Song of the Cell
ON 25 July 1978, Louise Joy Brown was born at Oldham General Hospital in the UK. The first child to be born following IVF, she was called a miracle baby by some, a test-tube baby by others, and a representation of the “degeneration of Western morals” by at least one.
A hundred years earlier, Walther Flemming, a German scientist, coined the term chromatin, meaning coloured substance, while he …