Who is an Immigrant? The Identity of a Nation

Friends:

I love pieces like these (see below), the work of dedicated scholars who do the hard, granular, decades-long work of trying to understand truly complex phenomena like national identity, attitudes toward immigrants by the larger population, attitudes among immigrants themselves toward immigrants and immigration, as well as the prevalence of ideologies like the American Dream.

After the Tomás Jiménez piece, I post below, the equally provoking "The American Dream, Revised," authored by Stanford Economics professor, Ran Abramitzky. These concise articles are part of a larger Stanford Magazine special issue that you should read, as they address historical tensions about immigration dating back to 1790 and the other, a focus on the meaning of citizenship.

At the outset, none of the articles in the special issue make note of the fact that the "nation of immigrants" myth is one that consists of shared stories within not solely, "a culture," but a dominant one, at that. So when we use this phrase, scholars included, this reflects a myth that is premised on the erasure of Native Americans that wittingly or unwittingly gets reinscribed even by what we know to be excellent scholarship, which this is.

As a side note, read Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò's book, Elite Capture, to unpack how it happens that dominant myths acquire unquestioned status.

This myth is so profound that it keeps us from acknowledging that from 1790 to the present is the most recent part of our history here on "Turtle Island"—the name for this continent that consists of Canada, the U.S., Mexico—and, for many, the Caribbean Islands and Greenland, as well.

When we factor in the Indigenous history of Native North America, not only did our ancestors travel freely up and down the continent, but they were also, as a consequence, intermarried and interconnected. After all, native North American tribes were mostly exogamous, meaning that they married outside their tribe, clan, or nation for purposes of strengthening alliances and promoting genetic diversity (Zion & Yazzie, 1997).

Similarly, take, for instance, the Uto-Aztecan language family, representing two Indigenous language groups, Ute and Nahuatl, that linguists like de la Cruz (2021) and Haugen (2025) know belong together. This, of course, concurs with the notion that the ancestral homeland of the Nahuatl-speaking Mexicas or Aztecs resides in what is known today as the state of Utah.

This is not a flight of fancy, but rather appears on the Disturnell map of 1847, which specifically notes "Aztlán," the Aztec's ancestral homeland, where the Colorado and Green rivers meet in Utah. This map was attached to the Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo. Read: Aztlanahuac: Mesoamerica in North American (April 7, 2005). The late Dr. Roberto Cintli Rodrigues is credited for bringing the Disturnell map to light.

De-tribalized Mexican Americans like myself are often viewed as "Mexica-centric," valuing the Aztec, as opposed to other forms of Indigenous identities. I think it's more than a false consciousness of privileging an imperialistic nation—although those kinds of logics can also simultaneously be at play for some. 

I still wonder at how these deep histories that connect us to this continent at our root accords us that depth for connection not just to our Indigenous identities, but also to the land, our land, Turtle Island where no one is neither illegal, nor an immigrant. Rather, the original peoples of native North America were enormously diverse (see Stiffarm & Lane, 1992) such that today's "inmigrantes," "migrants," or "immigrants" are largely our cousins returning home.

Finally, our complex, cultural heritage and the resilience of our ancestors should absolutely inspire a sense of pride and identity that transcends modern political boundaries and politics that want to make us forget that the longest part of our history on Turtle Island precedes July 4, 1776, the founding date of this nation, by millennia. 

This connection to our past helps us navigate our present and envision a future where our diverse Indigenous identities and languages are celebrated and preserved—while maintaining, as always, a sense of openness and compassion towards sojourners, refugees, and others today who want to make this place their home.

Enough said, enjoy these illuminating short pieces.

-Angela Valenzuela

Reference

de la Cruz, A. (2021). Introduction to Nahuatl: The Language of the Aztecs. University of New Mexico. Digital Repository.

Haugen, J. (2025). Uto-Aztecan. In S. Wichmann (Ed.), The Languages and Linguistics of Mexico and Northern Central America: A Comprehensive Guide (pp. 159-208). Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter Mouton.

Stiffarm, L.A. & Lane Jr., P. (1992). Demography of Native North America: A suggestion of American Indian survival,” in M. Annette Jaimes, ed., The State of Native America: Genocide, Colonization and Resistance. Boston: South End Press.

Zion, J. W., & Yazzie, R. (1997). Indigenous law in North America in the wake of conquest. Boston College International and Comparative Law Review, 20, 55.


The Immigration Puzzle:Four ways to think about the path to citizenship.

Winter 2025

Illustration: Alex Albadree

Photo: Do Pham/School of Humanities and Sciences/Stanford University 

The Identity of a Nation

Tomás Jiménez is a professor of sociology and the founding co-director of Stanford’s Institute for Advancing Just Societies. He is also director of the Qualitative Initiative within Stanford’s Immigration Policy Lab. His latest book, States of Belonging: Immigration Policies, Attitudes, and Inclusion, examines how state-level immigration policies shape belonging among Latino immigrants, U.S.-born Latinos, and U.S.-born whites in Arizona and New Mexico.

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My grandfather, a migrant farm worker from Mexico, used to tell my adolescent father: “Di me con quién andas, y te diré quién eres.” Tell me who you walk with, and I’ll tell you who you are, a warning prompting my father to think twice about the company he kept. A version of that warning guides how we understand American identity in response to immigration: Show me your immigration politics and policies, and I’ll tell you what kind of nation you are. Following that guidance draws attention to big and loud events—hasty policy responses, election outcomes, and politicians’ bombastic statements—that might lead us to conclude that we are a nation of immigrants no more.

But a fuller picture comes from the perspectives of the everyday individuals who make up the nation. As a sociologist who studies how immigrant newcomers and long-established populations adjust to each other, I have spent nearly two decades observing immigration opinion data and talking with hundreds of individuals from all walks of life about how immigration shapes their understanding of American identity. My observations lead me to conclude that the idea of the nation of immigrants is a nostalgic, historically oriented view more than an aspirational future-facing perspective. For 400 years, people worldwide have come to the land that would become the United States. They and their descendants have defined what the United States has become socially, politically, and economically. These very people laud immigrants from a bygone era, as well as contemporary immigrants who are well-settled. But they are also reluctant to allow future immigrants for fear of the resulting cultural changes.

Survey and interview data highlight three traits of people’s belief in the nation of immigrants. The first is that, collectively, they are ambivalent—they like the immigrants we have had but want to limit who comes next. Data from Gallup, a survey organization, showcases the ambivalence. Majorities of Americans have accommodating views of immigrants already here: They think immigration is good for the country, are sympathetic toward undocumented immigrants, support allowing undocumented immigrants to become citizens if they meet specific requirements, and have the same view of individuals brought to the United States without legal status as children. And yet, Americans also support beefed-up border security, expanding border wall construction, and limiting the number of individuals seeking asylum on the border.

Second, taken individually, Americans’ views defy contemporary caricatures of the close-the-border-and-deport-them-all Republicans versus open-the-border-to-everyone Democrats. True, Democrats and, to a lesser degree, independents express more accommodating views, while Republicans hold more restrictive opinions. Responses to hundreds of interviews my colleagues and I gathered in the 2010s in California, Arizona, and New Mexico animate how Americans defy partisan caricatures. Self-described liberal Democrats who believed in the benefits of immigration also told us there should be some controls. For example, when asked about border security, a Latino and liberal Democrat in Arizona said: “I’m for the border security. We can’t let everybody [in].” He added, “It sucks, you know. I feel they should let them be citizens. It’s a long process but let them be here.” Republicans who favored muscular border security also expressed sympathy for undocumented immigrants, which included allowing them to legalize and even become citizens. When we asked a staunch Donald Trump supporter whether she would favor more welcoming policies in her home state of New Mexico, she said, “I would support [restrictive policies], depending on how it was done. I don’t want people rounded up. I’d like to see it done more like, if you’ve been here for a number of years and can show proof of residency and proof you’ve got a job, you should be able to walk into an office somewhere and sign up for the road to citizenship.”

Third, survey data and interviews reveal that Americans’ concerns about immigration are principally tied to cultural change, with the English language front and center. The importance of English comes from a belief in the practical need for people to share a common language and from what it shows about a commitment to being part of the nation. Beyond that, Americans leave room for immigrants to weave their cultural threads into the national fabric. Responding to a question about English-only laws, a middle-aged woman in California encapsulated the consensus: “America is not one culture; it’s not a society of people. It’s multicultural. And why should people from other countries be stripped of their culture because they are now living in America? And I think English should be the first language. And if it means you learn, you have to learn.”

It would be easy to conclude from election-year immigration politics that the United States is no longer a nation of immigrants. But that’s not quite true. According to the people who make up the nation, we are more like a nation of immigrant descendants, confident in and proud of the country’s immigration history and the contributions that immigrants and their descendants have made. With the next administration, more restrictive immigration policies are likely to further entrench that notion.

The American Dream, Revised

Professor of economics Ran Abramitzky is the senior associate dean for the social sciences in the School of Humanities & Sciences. His research is in economic history and applied microeconomics, with a focus on immigration and income inequality. He is a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research and a senior fellow at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research. 

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For some readers, the phrase “streets of gold” evokes the age-old dream that immigrants can come to the United States penniless but quickly find opportunity. But my research partner, Leah Boustan, and I chose it as the title for our book for a different reason. We were inspired by the words of an unknown Italian immigrant, painted on the wall of the Ellis Island Museum, who is credited with saying, “I came to America because I heard the streets were paved with gold. When I got here, I found out three things: First, the streets weren’t paved with gold; second, they weren’t paved at all; and third, I was expected to pave them.”

In Streets of Gold: America’s Untold Story of Immigrant Success, we build new “big data” on millions of immigrant lives to reassess some of the common myths about immigration over the past two centuries. Think of us like curious grandchildren searching branches of their family tree online, but a million times over. We dug through genealogical websites like Ancestry.com that allow the public to search for their relatives, and developed methods to automate these searches so we could follow immigrants and their children as they moved up the economic ladder. As the unknown Italian immigrant knew all too well, we found that the “rags to riches” narrative of quick immigrant success has long been a myth. Both in the early 1900s and today, immigrants who have arrived with few skills have often continued to work in low-paying jobs throughout their lives.

In contrast, the children of immigrants have been very upwardly mobile, especially those who’ve grown up in poverty. The narrative that today’s immigrants and their families are stuck in a permanent underclass is another myth not borne by the evidence. 

For example, consider what happens when we compare children raised in families with similar earnings. And let’s think about children growing up at the 25th percentile of the income distribution, which is around $31,000 a year today, roughly equivalent to two adults working full time for the federal minimum wage. What we find in this apples-to-apples comparison is striking: The children of immigrants are able to move beyond the economic position of their parents more so than the children of U.S.-born parents. This mobility advantage shows up in every historical period and from nearly every country of origin and is particularly strong for the poorest families.

Focusing on children raised in the late 1970s and early 1980s, so that they are old enough for us to capture in the data their incomes in adulthood, we find that even children of parents from very poor countries like Nigeria and Laos earn more than the children of the U.S.-born raised in similar households. The children of immigrants from Central American countries—countries like Guatemala, El Salvador, and Nicaragua, which are often demonized for contributing to the “crisis” at the southern border—move up faster than the children of the U.S.-born, landing in the middle of the pack (right next to children of immigrants from Canada).

What’s more, some of the immigrant groups that politicians accused in the late 19th and early 20th centuries of having little to contribute to the economy—the Irish, Italians, and Portuguese—actually achieved the highest rates of upward mobility. Today, the children of immigrants from Mexico and the Dominican Republic are just as upwardly mobile as the children of Swedes and Danes were 100 years ago, going from the 25th percentile to the 50th percentile. One key factor that enabled the children of immigrants to escape poor circumstances and move up the economic ladder had to do with location. Immigrant parents have tended to move to areas that offered upward mobility for everyone. In the past, this mostly meant that immigrants did not settle in the American South, a region that offered fewer economic opportunities for them. The U.S. born, by comparison, were (and are) more rooted in place. 

One broad takeaway from our book to policy is that the short-term view that politicians tend to take for immigration undermines immigrants’ success. Catching up with the U.S. born might not happen for the immigrants themselves, but it does for their children. A long view of immigration policy, from the perspective of 100 years of U.S. immigration history and looking at the children of immigrants, could lead politicians to a more welcoming immigration policy that appreciates immigrants’ contributions to the U.S. economy and society. 

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.