Freedom, Not Abandonment: The Democratic Case for a Social Market Economy, by Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D. June 2, 2026

Freedom, Not Abandonment: The Democratic Case for a Social Market Economy

by Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D.

June 2, 2026

Link

I just finished listening to Clara E. Mattei’s Escape from Capitalism: An Intervention—a great Father’s Day gift, by the way, especially for anyone who enjoys a thoughtful challenge to economic common sense. 

Interestingly, the audiobook is currently available for free on the Barnes & Noble website, which feels delightfully “uncapitalistic.” I have only listened to the audiobook version, but as a non-economist, I found it remarkably accessible. One advantage of listening is that you can slow down the reading speed, giving yourself time to chew on concepts and findings that might otherwise pass by too quickly.

Mattei helps us see that capitalism is not only an economic system; it is a political order that defines freedom in a very narrow way. It tells us we are free when markets are free, even if people lack health care, housing, education, retirement security, or meaningful political voice. 

This is why the concept of a social market economy is useful. It offers a way to reject both market abandonment and caricatures of socialism by insisting on two democratic commitments at once: a social floor beneath everyone and limits on the corporate power that distorts public life. 

In this sense, the struggle for public goods and the struggle against corporate capture are not separate struggles. They are both struggles to make freedom real.

In the U.S., we are often taught to associate capitalism with liberty, opportunity, self-reliance, and prosperity. We are told that markets reward hard work, private enterprise creates abundance, and public goods are either unaffordable or inefficient. Yet for most people, our current economic order increasingly means debt, precarity, unaffordable health care, unaffordable housing, stagnant wages, weakened public schools, and the constant fear of falling behind.

Mattei’s intervention is powerful because she does not treat capitalism as neutral. Capitalism does not simply organize markets; it organizes people’s lives, fears, dependencies, and imaginations. It teaches us that unemployment is natural, poverty is personal failure, inflation must be solved by disciplining workers, and public institutions must always be cut, consolidated, or privatized in the name of fiscal responsibility.

Early in Escape from Capitalism, Mattei grounds this argument in the staggering scale of inequality that capitalism produces and then normalizes. She notes that in the United States, the wealth of the top 1 percent now rivals that of the bottom 90 percent, even as tens of millions of people continue to live in poverty (Mattei, 2026). This is not a small imbalance or temporary distortion. It is a social order in which wealth accumulates upward while insecurity spreads downward.

Mattei also turns our attention globally, showing how capitalism links poverty in one place to wealth accumulation elsewhere. In one vivid example, she discusses Mumbai’s Dharavi, one of the world’s largest informal settlements, where workers generate enormous economic value while much of that value flows away from them and into distant circuits of capital (Mattei, 2026; also see Behal, 2026). The point is not simply that inequality exists. The point is that inequality is organized through systems of ownership, labor, finance, and policy that make deprivation appear natural while making accumulation appear deserved.

This is one of Mattei’s most important insights: the economy is not a machine governed by natural laws. It is made and remade through policy, law, banking, taxation, budgeting, education, and ideology. When we are told, “there is no money,” “there is no alternative,” or “we have no choice,” we should pause. These are rarely neutral statements. More often, they are political decisions disguised as necessity.

Mattei helps us see that capitalism survives not only by extracting labor and wealth, but by making alternatives appear impossible. It narrows our sense of democracy. We may be allowed to vote, but we are not encouraged to ask whether democracy should extend into the economy, the workplace, the university, or the systems that determine whether people have health care, housing, education, food, clean water, and retirement security.

This narrowing of democracy is not only economic. It is political. The same system that concentrates wealth also allows concentrated wealth to shape elections, legislation, courts, universities, and public policy. 

This is where Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission matters so deeply (Supreme Court of the United States, 2010; Weiner, 2025).

If Mattei helps us see how concentrated wealth disciplines economic life,

Citizens United helps us see how concentrated wealth distorts democratic life. The 2010 Supreme Court decision did not simply expand “free speech” to include corporations. It expanded the political power of corporations, wealthy donors, and dark-money networks to influence public life while ordinary people are told that democracy still means one person, one vote.

The logic is painfully familiar. In the economy, corporations are treated as engines of freedom even when people are abandoned to debt, low wages, medical bankruptcy, and insecurity. In politics, corporations and wealthy interests are treated as “speakers” in the democratic process even when their money overwhelms the voices of ordinary citizens. In both cases, power disguises itself as freedom.

Photo Credit: AP Kelleher

That is why Hawaii’s recent effort to challenge the legacy of Citizens United is so important. In 2026, Hawaii enacted a first-of-its-kind law aimed at limiting corporate and dark-money influence in elections by redefining corporations as artificial entities created by the state, rather than natural persons entitled to the same political rights as human beings (Kelleher, 2026). 

I interject here to recommend two documentaries that make these dynamics vivid for students: Kimberly Reed’s Dark Money and CNN’s Deep in the Pockets of Texas. Dark Money examines the influence of untraceable corporate money on elections through the case of Montana and the real-life consequences of the Citizens United decision. 

Deep in the Pockets of Texas, reported by Ed Lavandera, brings the issue home by showing how a small number of wealthy donors have shaped politics in Texas, from school boards and city councils to the state legislature. Both films work especially well in the college classroom because they help students see that campaign finance is not an abstract legal issue; it is a struggle over who gets heard, whose interests count, and whether democracy can survive when money speaks louder than people.

The law is expected to face legal challenges, but its moral and democratic significance is already clear. Hawaii is asking a question the entire country should be asking: Why should entities created by law be allowed to dominate the very democracy that gives them legal existence?

Hawaii’s law matters because democracy cannot build or sustain a social market economy if corporations are permitted to dominate the political system that determines what counts as public policy, public investment, and the public good. Economic inequality becomes political inequality when corporations and billionaires can pour money into elections, shape public narratives, influence legislation, and punish dissent. 

We should not be surprised, then, when public schools are defunded, universities are disciplined, Ethnic Studies is attacked, labor is weakened, and privatization is presented as common sense. These are not isolated developments. They are part of a larger political economy in which concentrated wealth seeks to govern public life.

This is why Mattei’s work matters so deeply for those of us concerned with public education, higher education, Ethnic Studies, Mexican American Studies, gender studies, democracy, and the future of Texas. 

The attack on public goods is not separate from the attack on knowledge. The dismantling of diversity, equity, and inclusion offices; the consolidation or weakening of fields of study; the narrowing of curricula; and the privatization of education are all part of a broader political economy. They tell us that what belongs to the public must be reduced, managed, disciplined, or sold off.

Mattei gives us a language for naming this. Capitalism does not only exploit labor; it also narrows democracy. It tells us that education must serve the market rather than the public. It tells universities to behave like corporations, students to think of themselves as consumers, faculty to produce measurable outcomes rather than cultivate critical thought, and communities to treat their histories, languages, and ways of knowing as luxuries rather than foundations for democratic life.

This is precisely why Ethnic Studies is so threatening to authoritarian and market-driven forms of governance. Ethnic Studies teaches that people are not merely workers, consumers, taxpayers, or data points. It teaches that communities have histories, memories, struggles, epistemologies, and claims on the future. It teaches that democracy is not only about procedure; it is also about power, belonging, recognition, and repair.

Capitalism depends on organized forgetting. It asks us to forget colonization, slavery, segregation, land theft, labor exploitation, gendered violence, and the long histories of resistance that made democracy more real. It asks us to forget that public education itself emerged from struggle. It asks us to forget that the weekend, child labor laws, public schools, civil rights protections, bilingual education, voting rights, and workplace protections were not gifts from the wealthy. They were won by organized people.

At the same time, we need language that invites rather than alienates readers. In the United States, the word “socialism” often evokes fears of expropriation, state control, or the denial of individual differences and aspirations. Those associations are real, even when historically incomplete or politically exaggerated. For many readers, the word can shut down conversation before it begins.

So perhaps a more helpful way to speak is in terms of a social market economy: an economy that preserves individual freedom, entrepreneurship, private initiative, and personal ambition, but refuses to abandon people to economic ruin. A social market economy recognizes that freedom is hollow if losing a job, getting sick, aging, having a child, attending college, or needing housing can push a person or family into crisis.

A social market economy, understood through the lens of a caring economy, does not abolish markets or individuality; it insists that markets be regulated and oriented toward the human needs—health, education, housing, care, safety, and democratic voice—that make freedom real. 

This is not merely a semantic move; it is a conceptual shift that refuses both market fundamentalism and caricatures of socialism, opening political imagination beyond the false choice between market abandonment and state control, toward a democratic economic arrangement in which individual freedom is strengthened—not weakened—by a social floor beneath everyone.

This is where Amartya Sen, Nobel laureate in economics, helps complete the argument. If Mattei shows how capitalism narrows freedom and Citizens United shows how corporate power distorts democracy, Sen gives us a fuller language for what freedom actually requires. 

In Development as Freedom, Sen argues that genuine development should be measured not simply by income or market growth, but by the expansion of people’s real freedoms—their actual capabilities to live lives they have reason to value (Sen, 1999). His argument is important because he rejects the narrow idea that freedom is only “freedom from government.” Freedom also requires positive social conditions. A person who is formally “free” but lacks health care, schooling, food, housing, safety, or political voice is not meaningfully free.

That distinction matters. Public health care, public education, affordable housing, child care, and retirement security should not be dismissed as charity, dependency, or government overreach. They are collective investments in human capability. They expand the range of real choices available to people and make it possible for individuals and communities to participate more fully in economic, civic, cultural, and democratic life.

A society with a strong social floor does not eliminate individuality. It makes individuality more meaningful. People can take risks, start businesses, pursue education, care for family members, change jobs, create art, or speak politically when they are not living one emergency away from collapse. A welfare system that prevents people from hitting rock bottom economically is not the enemy of freedom. It is one of freedom’s preconditions.

But this requires more than social programs. It requires democracy protected from corporate capture. A social market economy cannot flourish if the political system itself is flooded with corporate and dark money. Public goods require public power. Public power requires democratic accountability. And democratic accountability requires that human beings—not corporations, artificial entities, or billionaire-funded networks—remain at the center of political life.

These questions are urgent in Texas. We are living through a moment in which public officials claim to defend freedom while constraining what can be taught, studied, named, or debated. They claim to protect taxpayers while redirecting public resources toward privatization. They claim to promote excellence while undermining the very programs that help historically excluded students see themselves as knowledge producers, leaders, and authors of the future.

When public institutions are weakened, communities lose democratic capacity. When curricula are narrowed, students lose historical memory. When universities are disciplined by political power, faculty lose academic freedom. When public goods are privatized, ordinary people lose access to the resources that make meaningful freedom possible. And when corporate money dominates elections, the people most harmed by these decisions have the least power to stop them.

For Texas, this is especially consequential. Our state’s future is diverse, multilingual, multiracial, and young. Yet our political leadership continues to legislate against that future by attacking DEI, Ethnic Studies, public education, voting rights, and democratic participation. These attacks are often justified in the language of efficiency, neutrality, excellence, or fiscal restraint. Mattei helps us understand that such language is not innocent. It is often the vocabulary through which power protects itself.

To escape capitalism, then, is not simply to imagine a distant alternative. It is to reclaim the present by insisting that health care, education, housing, retirement, clean water, public knowledge, and democratic participation are not mere commodities. They are conditions of collective life. Freedom is not being abandoned to the market. Freedom is not choosing among unaffordable options. Freedom is not debt. Freedom is not silence in the face of political intimidation. Freedom is the ability of people and communities to shape the conditions under which they live, learn, work, remember, and dream.

This is why the defense of Mexican American Studies, African American Studies, Women’s and Gender Studies, Indigenous Studies, and public education is not a narrow academic matter. It is part of a larger democratic struggle. These fields teach us to see the world historically, relationally, and structurally. They expose the myths that justify inequality. They remind students that the present was made—and therefore can be remade.

Mattei’s great contribution is to remind us that capitalism is not destiny. It is a political order, and political orders can be challenged. Hawaii’s challenge to Citizens United reminds us that corporate power is not destiny either. It, too, is a legal and political arrangement. It, too, can be contested.

The first step is intellectual: to stop mistaking domination for freedom, austerity for responsibility, privatization for innovation, market dependence for democracy, and corporate spending for speech. The next step is collective: to build institutions, movements, curricula, laws, and public policies that invest in people rather than discipline them.

That is the work before us. Not charity. Not nostalgia. Not reform around the edges of a system that produces abandonment by design.

The work is democratic reconstruction.

The work is reclaiming the public good.

The work is recovering freedom itself.

References

Behal, A. (2026, April 15). One of Asia’s richest men is grabbing sprawling slum and crushing its economy. Pulitzer Center. https://pulitzercenter.org/projects/one-asias-richest-men-grabbing-sprawling-slum-and-crushing-its-economy

Kelleher, J. S. (2026, May 14). New Hawaii law targets corporate influence in politics after Citizens United ruling. Associated Press. https://apnews.com/article/corporate-campaign-money-citizens-united-hawaii-71a28bc7e8f6e0279b31e999f222519a

Lavandera, E. (Reporter). (2022, June 24). Deep in the pockets of Texas [Television special]. CNN. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7B3PTuADIHQ

Mattei, C. E. (2026). Escape from capitalism: An intervention. Simon & Schuster.

Reed, K. (Director). (2018). Dark money [Film]. PBS Distribution; POV. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Money_(film)

Sen, A. (1999). Development as freedom. Alfred A. Knopf.

Supreme Court of the United States (2010). Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, 558 U.S. 310. https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/558/310/

Weiner, D. I. (2025, January 29). Citizens United, explained, Brennan Center for Justice. https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/citizens-united-explained

From Fossil Fuels Dependence to Shared Futures: What Venezuela’s Pivot Teaches Us, by Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D.

 From Fossil Fuels Dependence to Shared Futures: What Venezuela’s Pivot Teaches Us

by

Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D.

January 2, 2026

Venezuela’s recent decision to block oil exports to the United States while prioritizing markets in Asia marks a significant moment in global political economy—one that mainstream U.S. media have only partially addressed. A particularly clear and illuminating explanation is offered in the video published on December 31, 2025 titled, ¡Última hora! Venezuela bloquea exportaciones de petróleo a EE. UU.: lo que los medios no contarán (Breaking News! Venezuela Blocks Oil Exports to the U.S.: What the Media Won’t Tell You) by THAN Noticias, which situates this move within the broader context of U.S. sanctions, energy geopolitics, and a shifting multipolar world (THAN Noticias, 2024).

Read through this lens, Venezuela’s oil pivot is not simply a story about energy markets or foreign policy. It is a reminder that we live in an era of shared futures—in which sanctions, climate decisions, migration flows, and economic instability do not stop at national borders, but circulate through communities, classrooms, and institutions far from their point of origin.

As the analysis explains, decades of U.S. reliance on Venezuelan heavy crude—especially by Gulf Coast refineries designed for it—have been disrupted not simply by market forces, but by sustained sanctions that have failed to produce regime change even as it resulted in enormous suffering by Venezuelans, prompting millions to migrate to other countries, including the United States—demonstrating how policies framed as “foreign” quickly become domestic realities in societies shaped by shared economic and human futures.

Weisbrot & Sachs (2019) offer an excellent scholarly analysis on the complexity of responses to sanctions by targeted countries. Reviewing the evidence from the Global Sanctions Data Base, they find broad agreement that sanctions tend to reduce trade, investment, growth, and stability in target states, with effects that can persist long after sanctions end—but that these harms do not reliably translate into political compliance. Targets frequently respond by diverting trade and finance to third countries, shielding favored firms, forming new alliances, and sometimes retaliating—adaptation that can dilute sanctions’ leverage.

In this vein, Venezuela has redirected exports toward China and India, diversified its trading partners, and increasingly conducted transactions outside the U.S. dollar. This outcome reflects a broader pattern identified in the research literature: sanctions often incentivize adaptation and realignment rather than political compliance.

Why should an education blog care? Education is one of the primary institutions where shared futures are either acknowledged or denied—where students learn to see global crises either as someone else’s problem, or conversely, as collective challenges requiring cooperation, historical understanding, and ethical responsibility. One also learns how power operates through ostensibly technical—frequently blunt—policy tools, offering educators concrete case studies for teaching policy analysis, political economy, and global inequality.

Most importantly, this moment underscores two urgent imperatives. First, all nations—including the United States—must accelerate investment in clean and renewable energy technologies. Continued dependence on fossil fuels entrenches geopolitical conflict while delaying the climate transition that future generations will inherit. Second, sustainable global futures require diplomacy grounded in empirical evidence and mutual respect rather than coercion alone. 

Education has a vital role to play here: preparing students not only to understand these systems, but to imagine and build alternatives rooted in cooperation, sustainability, and shared responsibility in an increasingly multipolar world. Hence, despite sanctions, what impacts Venezuela impacts all of us in the U.S.

Disclaimer: I am not an economist so if I've missed anything or if anyone has anything to add, by all means state in the comment box below. Abundant thanks to Dr. Tony Baez for sharing this video with me. I had been meaning to look into this. I'm glad that I did. Happy New Year, everyone!

References

Global Sanctions Data Base. https://www.globalsanctionsdatabase.com/

THAN Noticias. (2024). ¡Última hora! Venezuela bloquea exportaciones de petróleo a EE. UU.: lo que los medios no contarán [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xyb53JhDvX0

Weisbrot, M., & Sachs, J. D. (2019). Economic sanctions as collective punishment: The case of Venezuela. Center for Economic and Policy Research. https://cepr.net/images/stories/reports/venezuela-sanctions-2019-04.pdf

The Power of Children's Curiosity to Learn: From Matamoros, Tamaulipas, Mexico to India, Africa, and the World, by Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D.

The Power of Children's Curiosity to Learn: From Matamoros, Tamaulipas, Mexico to India, Africa, and the World

by

Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D.

Oct. 29, 2025

It’s truly awesome to be an educator because I’m always learning—often in the very spaces where I teach. Last night, in my Race, Ethnicity, and the Schools course, we viewed the extraordinary film Radical, based on a true story set in Matamoros, Tamaulipas, Mexico—just across the border from Brownsville, where children grow up in the shadows of SpaceX, a striking symbol of both aspiration and inequality. I actually wrote a blog about the film back in December 2023, but revisiting it with my students brought new insights. 

I had invited members of the community to join us, including several teachers, and was deeply moved by what unfolded. One of our guests, Patricia Nuñez—who is pursuing her doctorate in Cultural Studies—shared the story behind Sergio, the visionary teacher portrayed in the film. His approach, she explained, was inspired by the groundbreaking work of Indian educator, Sugata Mitra, whose experiments in self-organized learning among children in India, Africa, and beyond have redefined what is possible in education. 

I can see how Sergio’s approach could be controversial—his methods defy convention and challenge deeply ingrained notions of authority, assessment, and control in schooling. Yet that is precisely what makes his story so powerful. He invites us to imagine what education could look like if curiosity, rather than compliance, became the organizing principle of learning. 

In communities too often written off as “deficient,” such radical trust in children’s capacities becomes an act of resistance—a declaration that brilliance is not the privilege of the few but the birthright of all. 

The movie is available on Amazon Prime. I encourage all to see it—and to connect it to Sugata Mitra’s work as captured in the TED Talk he delivered a number of years ago, linked below.

What Radical ultimately teaches us is that transformative education begins with trust and a caring relationship between teachers and students. It asks us, as educators, parents, and community members, to look beyond limitations and see what is possible when children are given the freedom to learn, to fail, and to discover for themselves. 

Watching my students and community guests wrestle with these questions yesterday afternoon reminded me that learning is never a one-way exchange; it’s a shared act of courage and imagination. It was a joy for us to bridge all our worlds—university and community, theory and lived experience, teacher and learner—and to find common purpose in our love for education and justice. 

Moments like these remind me why I teach: because every time we gather to question, listen, and dream together, something sacred and transformative takes root.

In Sergio’s classroom—and in our own—we are reminded that radical hope is not naïve. It is, rather, the lifeblood of every genuine effort to teach, to nurture, and to believe in the brilliance that already lives within every child.

996,804 views Sep 7, 2010 http://www.ted.com Indian education scientist Sugata Mitra tackles one of the greatest problems of education -- the best teachers and schools don't exist where they're needed most. In a series of real-life experiments from New Delhi to South Africa to Italy, he gave kids self-supervised access to the web and saw results that could revolutionize how we think about teaching.
TEDTalks is a daily video podcast of the best talks and performances from the TED Conference, where the world's leading thinkers and doers give the talk of their lives in 18 minutes. TED stands for Technology, Entertainment, Design, and TEDTalks cover these topics as well as science, business, development and the arts. Closed captions and translated subtitles in a variety of languages are now available on TED.com, at http://www.ted.com/translate. Watch a highlight reel of the Top 10 TEDTalks at http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/top10

Rethinking Masculinity: On "How to Be a 'Real' Man" with Lilly Sing and Guest Nikhil Taneja

I am happy to learn about vlogger, Lilly Sing, whose body of work includes her powerful and timely conversations, including this one with Nikhil Taneja on How to Be a 'Real' Man. It’s a refreshingly honest deep dive into the weight of patriarchy—not just as a system that oppresses women and gender-diverse individuals, but as one that also harms men by stifling their emotional expression and humanity. 

Taneja, a writer, producer, and passionate mental health advocate, speaks with raw vulnerability about the crushing expectations of traditional gender roles and how they have shaped—and often warped—his understanding of self.

What stands out is how the episode reframes masculinity not as something fixed or biologically determined, but as a performance enforced through generations of social conditioning. Taneja reflects on how boys are taught to “man up,” to suppress fear, tenderness, and grief—lessons that often calcify into emotional repression. The courage it takes to unlearn this is not trivial. He articulates, with great sensitivity, the very real fear that comes with opening up: fear of being judged, dismissed, or worse, of facing social or even physical retaliation. The vulnerability of which he speaks is not only compelling—it’s transformative.

This episode also serves as a potent counter-narrative to the hypermasculine “bro culture” that continues to dominate media, politics, and everyday life. Such culture glorifies aggression, domination, and emotional detachment, perpetuating a narrow and ultimately destructive vision of what it means to be a man. In contrast, Singh and Taneja offer a liberatory path—one grounded in empathy, critical self-reflection, and emotional truth-telling.

This isn’t just about redefining masculinity; it’s about dismantling the toxic legacies we inherit and forging space for healing. Enough with the narrow prescriptions and hidden rules of culture that are so confining to all. Whether rooted in patriarchy, colonialism, or caste-based expectations, these scripts rob us of our fullness. This conversation is a call to dismantle them—for everyone’s sake. It reminds us that true strength lies not in emotional stoicism but in the radical act of being real—of being human.

-Angela Valenzuela

This episode is for every man who’s ever been told to “man up.”I sat down with writer and mental health advocate Nikhil Taneja to talk about something we don’t talk about enough: how the patriarchy is hurting men too! From emotional repression to performative masculinity, we unpack how outdated ideas of manhood are leaving so many men feeling lost, disconnected, and alone... and what real strength and healing actually look like. We cover: -Why vulnerability is a superpower -What healthy masculinity really looks like -How pop culture has failed our boys -And why men need safe spaces just as much as women do Share this conversation with every boy and man you care about! This episode of Shame Less with Lilly Singh is presented by my charity, Unicorn Island Fund. Follow us for BTS and exclusive snippets that won’t be posted anywhere else:   / unicornisland   Follow Nikhil: https://www.instagram.com/tanejamainh... Follow Lilly:   / lilly  

Introducing Dr. Siddhartha Mukherjee, Prize-Winning author of "The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer" and "The Song of the Cell"

Friends:

I am a great admirer of Dr. Siddhartha Mukherjee, the Pulitzer Prize–winning physician and author of several books, most notably "The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer." I highly recommend the audiobook version. He needs no introduction in the field of oncology, meaning a focus on cancer prevention and treatment, but rather to those in my corner of the universe who might not yet be aware of this luminary.

What makes Mukherjee a rock star is that he is able to share his vast scientific knowledge and explorations about cells and cancer in language that is not only accessible but also very engaging. I appreciate how he intersperses history, storytelling, and classical literature into his accounts, showing how the liberal arts or humanities expand thought that we otherwise think of as "scientific" or "technical."

At the risk of sounding cheesy, I confess that reading The Emperor of All Maladies swept me off my feet.  His storytelling was so vivid and inspiring that, for fleeting moments, I found myself imagining a different life—one where I, too, might have pursued the path of a scientist with his blend of passion, brilliance, and the arts.

I caught myself fantasizing about what it might take to make such a career change now, captivated as I was by the beauty and purpose he brings to his meticulous pursuit of the science of healing. Somewhere, I read that he teaches his students to view each cell as a garden with its unique structure and singular beauty. Some, of course, get off the grid and cause harm. This is the stuff of greatness.

His latest book is "The Song of the Cell: An Exploration of Medicine and the New Human is the focus of this piece that came out a year ago in the Stanford Magazine. The story mentions how Mukherjee co-founded biotech ventures, advancing therapies like CAR-T in India to harness the immune system against cancer. His research is visionary and compassionate. I hope and trust that his explorations will ignite new generations of scientists equally desirous to unravel life's mysteries in ways so compelling and humane.

I hope that Dr. Mukherjee's research and writing are helpful to others as much as they've been to me. Happy New Year, everybody!

-Angela Valenzuela

Song of the Scientist

By Tracie White

Photography by Bill Wadman | Dec. 2023 | Stanford Magazine

Begin at the beginning, inside a cell. That’s where the mystery starts. Float around in the protoplasm for a while, inspecting the nucleus, looking for broken cogs, rusty machinery. Squeeze through the membrane pores and inspect the surface proteins there. Cells tell stories if you look closely enough. If you know how to read them. 

“Cells speak to me, especially blood cells,” says Siddhartha Mukherjee, ’93, the Pulitzer Prize–winning physician-author. He’s seated at a microscope in his Columbia University oncology lab on a snowy winter morning, peering inside white blood cells—immune cells designed to fight off infections—in a smear of bone marrow on a glass slide. Cancer can hijack these cells, destroying the body’s ability to fight infection. He describes these mornings in his latest book, The Song of the Cell. 

“On Monday, I arrive much earlier than my patients, when the morning light is still aslant across the black slate of the lab benches. I close the shutters and peer through the microscope at blood smears,” he writes. “The slides are like previews of books, or movie trailers. The cells will begin to reveal the stories of the patients even before I see them in person.”

Mukherjee, both a hematologist and an oncologist, transforms the stories hidden within our cells into massive, bestselling books that explore what it means to be human in a world where cells define all life. His three best-known titles journey first through the history of cancer, then genes, and finally cells, building metaphors and asking weighty questions about the foundations of science and where it is headed. Then he takes what he learns from his explorations in writing and returns to the laboratory with new ideas for treating patients. Those explorations, in turn, feed his work with four biotech start-ups he co-founded—three in the United States and one in India—that are developing therapies for leukemias and other blood cancers. 

“Sid thinks big and sees big,” says Atul Gawande, ’87, himself the author of four bestselling books on medicine, a surgeon, and a friend of Mukherjee’s. “He’s able to see the entire landscape of cancer, the gene, and then the cell, and then on and on. He’s driven by understanding at the molecular level what our lives are like as an organism, and even at the societal level. That’s how he makes sense of the world.” 

‘Sid thinks big and sees big. He’s able to see the entire landscape of cancer, the gene, and then the cell, and then on and on.’

From the microscope room, Mukherjee walks down a hall, past the lab’s work benches, into his office. The phone rings. It’s his wife, the sculptor Sarah Sze, calling from across town, where she’s installing an exhibit at the Guggenheim Museum, to remind him to pick up one of their daughters after school—they have two, ages 13 and 18. (In 2016, Vogue magazine ran a photo of Mukherjee and Sze in her New York studio under the headline “Meet the Most Brilliant Couple in Town.”) The pair were recruited together to Columbia in 2009, where Mukherjee is an assistant professor of medicine and Sze is a professor of visual arts. 

Mukherjee apologizes for his messy office, but it’s not messy, really, just a reflection of the many different directions his mind spins. Leaning back in his chair, he surveys the books and papers scattered across his desk, which is next to an overfilled bookshelf. History, medicine, science, literature—he quotes from across disciplines not only in his writing but also in his daily conversations. He has a particular fondness for the playwright Anton Chekhov, who, he likes to point out, was also a physician. “I read all the time,” he says. He reads in bed, at the kitchen table, in his lab, on planes. That’s how he writes, as well—whenever he gets a free moment. He nods toward what he calls “his famous red writing bed.” It’s a cot, now faded orange, covered with an old quilt. 

Mukherjee’s books, beginning with The Emperor of All Maladies, which tells a history of cancer and won the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction, are talked about in the scientific community “with some kind of awe,” says Irving Weissman, a Stanford professor of pathology and of developmental biology who is renowned for his stem cell research. The Gene, Mukherjee’s 2016 bestseller, charts the discovery of the basic unit of heredity, from Gregor Mendel’s wrinkled peas to the genetic engineering tool CRISPR. And The Song of the Cell, published in 2022, is a 496-page crash course in cellular biology—one that helps readers understand the significance of medicine’s cellular therapies and the promise they hold for treating anything, or maybe everything, that ails us.

What’s special about Mukherjee, Weissman says, is that he thinks deeply about the world of science and medicine and can translate that to the public. “Being creative in two fields and having the desire to try to help people with your creativity—well, I think that encapsulates Sid.” 

Life’s Work

Mukherjee was fascinated with cells early on. But then he was interested in so many things. Born in Delhi in 1970, he trained as a singer of Indian classical music, learned languages easily, and explored everything from science to poetry to art to philosophy. He remembers a biology teacher who talked about the big unanswered questions in the field, like how do your cells take on different functions, since they all contain the same DNA? How do they form an organism?

As an undergraduate at Stanford, he worked in the lab of Nobel laureate Paul Berg, famous for his recombinant DNA research that led to gene splicing and helped launch the biotech industry. He liked how Berg’s career brokered the worlds inside and outside the lab. “Paul was one of the global leaders in what is now the field of the ethics of genetics,” Mukherjee says. “I was very interested in ethics.” After graduating, he moved to England to attend Oxford University on a Rhodes scholarship, where he lived the life of a scientist, immersed in the world of immune cells, T-cells, and cell surface proteins. His PhD in immunology provided some of the keys to unlocking future therapies. To truly understand medical science, though, he believed he needed to learn from patients as well, so he moved to Boston, where he enrolled in medical school at Harvard. 

During an oncology fellowship at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston, Mukherjee faced daily life-or-death decisions about patient treatments. That’s when he started keeping a journal, trying to make sense of so much suffering. The Emperor of All Maladies draws from those experiences—“an epic story that he seems compelled to tell, the way a passionate young priest might attempt a biography of Satan,” wrote Jonathan Weiner in a New York Times review of the book. 

“[As] I emerged from the strange desolation of those two fellowship years, the questions about the larger story of cancer emerged with urgency,” Mukherjee wrote in the book’s prologue. “How old is cancer? What are the roots of our battle against this disease? Or, as patients often asked me: Where are we in the ‘war’ on cancer? How did we get here? Is there an end? Can this war even be won?” Mukherjee spent five years reading scientific papers and history books, and interviewing physicians, scientists, and patients. Among his chapters are the stories of Atossa, the Persian queen whose Greek slave cut off her cancerous breast, and the primitive radiation and chemotherapy treatments of the early 20th century. 

“I was thinking, ‘Who is going to read 600 pages on cancer?’ ” Sze recalls. “ ‘It sounds like a real downer.’ ” She admits now that she couldn’t have been more wrong.

The book begins on May 21, 2004, just after Mukherjee’s patient Carla Reed was admitted to the cancer ward on the 14th floor of Massachusetts General Hospital. The 30-year-old kindergarten teacher and mother of three from Ipswich, Mass., was diagnosed as having acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL). ALL grows out of the bone marrow, where it produces white blood cells that don’t look normal under a microscope. Reed’s were broken cells, unable to fight off infections. And they would multiply quickly, crowding out the healthy blood-forming cells needed for life. “Leukemia is cancer of the white blood cells—cancer in one of its most explosive, violent incarnations,” Mukherjee wrote. “Its pace, its acuity, its breathtaking, inexorable arc of growth forces rapid, often drastic decisions; it is terrifying to experience, terrifying to observe, and terrifying to treat.”

That first day in the hospital, Mukherjee told Reed her chances of survival were 30 percent and that chemotherapy would begin immediately. He would infuse toxic chemicals into her body repeatedly over the coming months. She slept poorly, her hair fell out, she couldn’t eat. Treatment after treatment, lying on a table, she told Mukherjee she often wondered whether she would ever wake up. 

“Walking across the hospital in the morning to draw yet another bone marrow biopsy, with the wintry light crosshatching the rooms, I felt a certain dread descend on me,” Mukherjee wrote, “a heaviness that bordered on sympathy but never quite achieved it.” It wasn’t the first time he’d realized the need to create space for himself, separate from his patients. In 2002, he’d attended an exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, where he met the artist. They fell in love, and after their wedding in 2004, Sze remembers her new husband being overcome by worry for his patients. But she also remembers how, even then, he continued to think on a grand scale. Late one night, she joined him for dinner at the hospital cafeteria.

“Everyone was in scrubs, looking worn out,” Sze remembers. “We were having something like mac and cheese, I don’t know, it was all looking very grim. He told me: ‘There are two things I want to do. I either want to write a book about cancer or start a hospital in India.’ I thought, ‘Great, sweetheart, there goes your beeper.’ ”

Reed would fully recover, rejoining the life of her family. For Mukherjee, watching such transformations were among the most “sublime moments of my clinical life.” He set out to recapture that feeling again and again.

Family Stories

The Gene elevated public discussion about genetic research, just as The Emperor had done for cancer. “First the idea of the gene had to be invented. Then the physical entity, present in each cell of our bodies, in every living thing, had to be discovered,” wrote James Gleick in a New York Times review. “The story of this invention and this discovery has been told, piecemeal, in different ways, but never before with the scope and grandeur that Siddhartha Mukherjee brings to his new history.”

In the story, Mukherjee writes of family distress and mental illness as he explores the intersections of biological inheritance and historical trauma, of genetics versus the environment. “Madness has been among the Mukherjees for generations,” he writes. In Delhi, he and his older sister grew up in a home that included their paternal grandmother and an uncle, her adult son, who had schizophrenia. Another of his uncles had bipolar disorder. Mental illness was seen as a family affliction. In the book, he recalls his grandmother, Priyabala, with reverence. “She weathered the buffets of heredity with something more than resilience: a grace that we, as her descendants, can only hope to emulate.” He dedicated The Gene to his grandmother and to Carrie Buck, a young woman forcibly sterilized in 1927 under Virginia’s eugenics law.

A few years later, Mukherjee turned his writerly attentions from the gene to the cell. It happened during the COVID-19 pandemic, when he was immersed in broken cells and surrounded by sickness, the ambulance sirens a constant wail outside his New York office window. He was desperate for a world of cohesion and symmetry, so he wrote about the need for balance within cells. He probed how human health depends on cellular connection, much like it does on human connection. And that brought to mind how much he had missed his family during his first year at Stanford, a story he tells in The Song of the Cell. 

Through exchanging letters with his dad, he learned more about the migration journey he’d taken. Sibeswar, known as Shibu, had fled his home in East Bengal (now Bangladesh) with his mother and four brothers just before the partition of India in 1947. The upheaval was one of the most violent in world history. “Partition was the big story [that] loomed on our lives for a long time,” Mukherjee says. “It was such a traumatic event.” Through the letters, Mukherjee began to understand how hard his father had worked to build a new sense of belonging in Delhi. In the winter of Mukherjee’s frosh year, Shibu sent him a plane ticket home to India, knowing his son would need comforting. “My father was there, as he would be year after year, when I returned, with a white shawl draped around himself, and an extra one to wrap around me,” Mukherjee writes.  “Coming back. Belonging.”

The Song of the Cell follows the history of scientific inquiry that eventually discovered life was built out of the microscopic units we call cells. Mukherjee’s narration keeps readers swimming through protoplasm, the living part of a cell, with its nucleus, cytoplasm, and organelles. Mukherjee discusses the ethical debates that have surrounded novel technologies such as in vitro fertilization, stem cell transplants, and gene cloning. And he explores the concerns surrounding modern-day advances in genetic manipulation, urging caution in the new world of CRISPR, a power­ful gene-editing technique that he and other scientists use in their labs but that also could be used in the creation of designer babies. 

“He’s very artful in telling stories that make you feel the humanity behind the science stories,” says Tyler Johnson, a Stanford clinical assistant professor of medicine in oncology and a science writer. “He’s able to demystify the inner workings of DNA and cellular metabolism in a way that is faithful to the science but comprehensible to people who are not scientists.”

Making Therapies

Mukherjee, dressed in a blue plaid suit and a black collarless shirt, with a gold ring on each hand, gets up out of his chair and strides through his office door, headed down the hall to the heart of his lab, the benchwork rooms with beakers and centrifuges and jeans-clad scientists growing cancer cells and creating therapies.

Mukherjee’s lab studies the biology of blood development in premalignant and malignant diseases such as myelodysplasia, which often advances to acute myelogenous leukemia (AML), a cancer characterized by an overproduction of immature blood cells that take over the bone marrow and pour into the bloodstream. About half a dozen projects in the lab aim to fight these diseases by using new gene-editing approaches such as base editing, which helps scientists more precisely target small, cancer-linked mutations. Most of the projects are focused on improving treatments for AML, the deadliest form of leukemia. 

Abdullah Mahmood Ali, an assistant professor of medical sciences at Columbia who collaborates with Mukherjee, updates him on the progress of an experimental therapy to treat AML—a variation on bone marrow transplants that protects healthy cells from the toxicity of treatments that can kill not only cancerous cells but also healthy ones. Using CRISPR, the scientists took blood stem cells from a bone marrow donor and tweaked the cell surface proteins, which communicate with other cells, to make them “invisible” to targeted immunotherapy. Think of it as an invisibility cloak, Ali explains. The therapy is undergoing human testing at Vor Bio in Boston, a biotech start-up that Mukherjee founded.

‘My primary interest is human therapy. I like to make medicines. It’s the most exciting thing you could ever do.’

“My primary interest is human therapy,” Mukherjee says. “I like to make medicines. It’s the most exciting thing you could ever do.” When he’s in the clinic, Mukherjee treats the “sickest of the sick”—patients who have undergone chemotherapy and bone marrow transplants and still relapsed, says Azra Raza, a physician-scientist who researches blood cancers at Columbia. He then brings his motivation to cure them into the lab. “Someone like Sid comes around once in a generation,” Raza says. “He has an incredible mass of information in his head. He thinks quantum leaps ahead of other people.”

Returning Home

It’s late afternoon, and the light in Mukherjee’s office begins to fade. But Mukherjee is still thinking and talking and making plans. He talks about the art scene in New York City, visiting museums on weekends. He admits, a bit sheepishly, that he also has artistic talents. In fact, some of his obsessive doodling of molecules appears in his books. He grins. Sure, he’s obsessive about his work, but he loves his life outside the office. He and Sze throw elaborate dinner parties in their Manhattan apartment, for which he cooks. Sze describes how, when her husband likes a dish at a restaurant, he dissects it, smelling it, tasting it, talking to the chef if he can’t figure out how it was made—and then re-creates it at home. “It’s a good metaphor for how he looks at life,” Sze says. “He’s always kind of sniffing out good ideas. Always on the prowl for things to be cracked open and solved.” 

The family travels every year to New Delhi. Mukherjee’s father and grandmother have passed, but his mother still lives in the home where he grew up. He also makes regular trips to Bengaluru, where his start-up Immuneel Therapeutics treats leukemia patients who have relapsed with chimeric antigen receptor T-cell (CAR-T) therapy, an approach that uses the body’s own immune system to ambush cancer cells. CAR-T therapies have been available in the United States for about a decade, treating certain blood cancers—though not AML—at a cost of around $400,000 per patient, but weren’t available in India. The first clinical trial at Immuneel plans to include up to 24 pediatric and adult patients.

“This is the first child that we treated,” Mukherjee says. He’s looking at a photo of a 9-year-old boy in India attached to an IV bag. “This is me opening his therapy line,” Mukherjee says proudly. “He was very, very sick, close to dying.” One year out from his CAR-T therapy, his cancer was in remission. 

Again, Mukherjee’s cell phone starts ringing. When he hangs up, he’s strangely still. The constantly moving fingers, combing through his hair, twiddling pens, touching items on his desk, riffling papers, doodling, suddenly cease moving.

“I just heard about a friend who is dying,” he says. (Author and historian Patrick French died the next day in London.) Slouching low in his chair, Mukherjee discards his shoes, and rests his stockinged feet on the quilt-covered writing bed. He’s a great compartmentalizer, he says. That’s how he does so many things. But sometimes worlds collide, like this moment in this lab where he makes medicines and learns about a friend he can’t save. He looks at his feet resting on the cot, then touches the quilt, lovingly.

“It’s hand-blocked,” he says. “It’s special, from India, a work of art.” 

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Tracie White is a senior writer at Stanford. Email her at traciew@stanford.edu.