From the dawn of life itself, every being that has ever lived owes its existence to the cell.

The discovery of this vital form led to a transformation in medicine but also in our understanding of ourselves - not as bodies or machines but as ecosystems. It has also given us the power to treat a vast array of mortal maladies...and even to create new kinds of human altogether.

Rich with stories of scientists, doctors and the patients whose lives may be saved by their work, The Song of the Cell is a stunning ode to the building blocks of life and the cutting-edge science harnessing their power for the better.

Winner of the 2023 PROSE Award for Excellence in Biological and Life Sciences and the 2023 Chautauqua Prize! Named a New York Times Notable Book and a Best Book of the Year by The Economist, Oprah Daily, BookPage, Book Riot, the New York Public Library, and more! In The Song of the Cell, the extraordinary author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning The Emperor of All Maladies and the #1 New York Times bestseller The Gene "blends cutting-edge research, impeccable scholarship, intrepid reporting, and gorgeous prose into an encyclopedic study that reads like a literary page-turner" (Oprah Daily). Mukherjee begins this magnificent story in the late 1600s, when a distinguished English polymath, Robert Hooke, and an eccentric Dutch cloth-merchant, Antonie van Leeuwenhoek looked down their handmade microscopes. What they saw introduced a radical concept that swept through biology and medicine, touching virtually every aspect of the two sciences, and altering both forever. It was the fact that complex living organisms are assemblages of tiny, self-contained, self-regulating units. Our organs, our physiology, our selves--hearts, blood, brains--are built from these compartments. Hooke christened them "cells." The discovery of cells--and the reframing of the human body as a cellular ecosystem--announced the birth of a new kind of medicine based on the therapeutic manipulations of cells. A hip fracture, a cardiac arrest, Alzheimer's dementia, AIDS, pneumonia, lung cancer, kidney failure, arthritis, COVID pneumonia--all could be reconceived as the results of cells, or systems of cells, functioning abnormally. And all could be perceived as loci of cellular therapies. Filled with writing so vivid, lucid, and suspenseful that complex science becomes thrilling, The Song of the Cell tells the story of how scientists discovered cells, began to understand them, and are now using that knowledge to create new humans. Told in six parts, and laced with Mukherjee's own experience as a researcher, a doctor, and a prolific reader, The Song of the Cell is both panoramic and intimate--a masterpiece on what it means to be human. "In an account both lyrical and capacious, Mukherjee takes us through an evolution of human understanding: from the seventeenth-century discovery that humans are made up of cells to our cutting-edge technologies for manipulating and deploying cells for therapeutic purposes" (The New Yorker).

This book focuses on molecular shapes, molecular symmetry, application of molecular orbital concepts to the compounds of main-group and transition elements of varied symmetry, metal-metal bonding, organometallic compounds such as ferrocene, fundamentals of redox properties, and spectroscopic term symbols. For compounds of d-block elements, it delves into discussions on structures and bonding theories (valence bond, crystal field, and molecular orbital), properties (magnetic, spectral, and redox), and reactivities. Basics and applications of organometallic compounds of d-block elements in catalysis and selected topics of bioinorganic chemistry have also been included. An attempt has been made to integrate selected focused topics, which is expected to help both the students and instructors, reducing the need to consult other specialized books.For the convenience of the instructors and students, the book highlights in each chapter take home messages. Examples in each subtopic, and at the end of any chapter a list of further reading and exercises to critically think about the concepts are discussed. Almost every chapter lists references to the literature and reviews that has been found to be particularly useful in the advanced Inorganic Chemistry courses. At the end of the book an appendix that gives hints/full answers of the exercises is included.

The Song of the Cell is the vivid, thrilling and suspenseful story of the fundamental unit of life. It describes how scientists discovered cells, began to understand them, and are now using that knowledge to create new humans. Both panoramic and intimate, it is Siddhartha Mukherjee's most spectacular book yet. In the late 1600s, a distinguished English polymath, Robert Hooke, and an eccentric Dutch cloth-merchant, Antonie van Leeuwenhoek, look down their hand-made microscopes. What they see introduces a radical concept that alters both biology and medicine forever. It is the fact that complex living organisms are assemblages of tiny, self-contained, self-regulating units. Our organs, our physiology, our selves, are built from these compartments. Hooke christens them 'cells'. The discovery of cells announced the birth of a new kind of medicine. A hip fracture, a cardiac arrest, Alzheimer's, AIDS, lung cancer - all could be re-conceived as the results of cells, or a cellular ecosystem, functioning abnormally. And all could be treated by therapeutic manipulations of cells. This revolution in cell biology is still in progress: it represents one of the most significant advances in science and medicine. Rich with stories of scientists, doctors, and the patients whose lives may be saved by their work, The Song of the Cell is the third book in this extraordinary writer's exploration of what it means to be human.

A stunning, multi-perspective epic about class division, the contraints of gender roles, and the history of India. After living in the US for years, Maneka Roy returns home to India to mourn the loss of her mother and finds herself in a new world. The booming city of Hrishipur where her father now lives is nothing like the part of the country where she grew up, and the more she sees of this new, sparkling city, the more she learns that nothing — and no one — here is as it appears. Ultimately, it will take an unexpected tragic event for Maneka and those around her to finally understand just how fragile life is in this city built on aspirations. Written from the perspectives of ten different characters, Oindrila Mukherjee’s incisive debut novel explores class divisions, gender roles, and stories of survival within a society that is constantly changing and becoming increasingly Americanised. It’s a story about India today, and people impacted by globalisation everywhere: a tale of ambition, longing, and bitter loss that asks what it really costs to try to build a dream. 

This book, Crop Sustainability and Intellectual Property Rights, merges the concepts of traditional agriculture, crop sustainability, and intellectual property rights associated with plant protection and agricultural products. This volume provides a comprehensive account of the perspectives of traditional agriculture, crop sustainability, and various strategies associated with crop tolerance to adverse environmental conditions. It also highlights the role of agricultural intellectual property rights, along with the implications for plant patents, protection of farmers’ rights, and geographical indication in plant products to provide a broader outlook toward strategies for sustainable agriculture and global food security associated with IPR. The chapters provide an overview of sustainable crop cultivation in a variety of ways, with both traditional agriculture as well as with new biotechnological approaches. The volume explores several stress resilience strategies and issues for crops, considering how to mitigate the effect of increased carbon dioxide concentration, heavy metal pollution, over-salinized soils, and cold spells. It also discusses how to make desert farming more efficient; how to increase abiotic stress tolerance of crops with grafting, seed soaking/priming, soil amendment, and foliar applications; and more. The chapters on agricultural intellectual property rights address IPR in conjunction with food security, the rights of farmers, legal applications and protection of plant patents, protection of traditional knowledge, international legal issues, and plant variety protection rights in agriculture and more. The book will be valuable for academicians and researchers at universities and research institutes working on stress physiology, genomics, proteomics, genetic engineering, breeding, and sustainable agriculture. Furthermore, lawyers, policymakers, and legal executives associated with agriculture and plant science will find useful information as well.

A magnificent, beautifully written biography of cancer -- from its first documented appearances thousands of years ago through the epic battles to cure, control and conquer it, to a radical new understanding of its essence.

In The Emperor of All Maladies, Siddhartha Mukherjee, doctor, researcher and award-winning science writer, examines cancer with a cellular biologist's precision, a historian's perspective, and a biographer's passion. The result is an astonishingly lucid and eloquent chronicle of a disease humans have lived with - and perished from - for more than five thousand years.

The story of cancer is a story of human ingenuity, resilience and perseverance, but also of hubris, arrogance and misperception, all leveraged against a disease that, just three decades ago, was thought to be easily vanquished in an all-out 'war against cancer'. Mukherjee recounts centuries of discoveries, setbacks, victories and deaths, told through the eyes of predecessors and peers, training their wits against an infinitely resourceful adversary.

From the Persian Queen Atossa, whose Greek slave cut off her malignant breast, to the nineteeth-century recipient of primitive radiation and chemotherapy and Mukherjee's own leukemia patient, Carla, The Emperor of All Maladies is about the people who have soldiered through toxic, bruising, and draining regimes to survive and to increase the store of human knowledge.

Riveting and magesterial, The Emperor of All Maladies provides a fascinating glimpse into the future of cancer treatments and a brilliant new perspective on the way doctors, scientists, philosophers and lay people have observed and understood the human body for millennia.

“How ought one to live?� This is the question that obsesses London-based publisher Ayush, driving him to question every act of consumption. He embarks on a radical experiment in his own life and the lives of those connected to him: his practical, economist husband; their twins; and even the authors he edits and publishes. One of those authors, a mysterious M. N. Opie, writes a story about a young academic involved in a car accident that causes her life to veer in an unexpected direction. Another author, an economist, describes how the gift of a cow to an impoverished family on the West Bengal–Bangladesh border sets them on a startling path to tragedy. Together, these connected narratives raise the question: How free are we really to make our own choices? In a scathing, compassionate quarrel with the world, Neel Mukherjee confronts our fundamental assumptions about economics, race, appropriation, and the tangled ethics of contemporary life.

**A NEW YORK TIMES, DAILY TELEGRAPH, ECONOMIST, MAIL ON SUNDAY and GUARDIAN BOOK OF THE YEAR 2022** 'As big a topic as life itself; I'm not sure a writer could cover it better' The Times From the prize-winning author of The Emperor of All Maladies, The Song of the Cell tells the vivid, thrilling and suspenseful story of the fundamental unit of life. In the late 1600s, a distinguished English polymath, Robert Hooke, and an eccentric Dutch cloth-merchant, Antonie van Leeuwenhoek, look down their hand-made microscopes. What they see introduces a radical concept that alters both biology and medicine forever. It is the fact that complex living organisms are assemblages of tiny, self-contained, self-regulating units. Our organs, our physiology, our selves, are built from these compartments. Hooke christens them 'cells'. The discovery of cells announced the birth of a new kind of medicine. A hip fracture, a cardiac arrest, Alzheimer's, AIDS, lung cancer - all could be re-conceived as the results of cells, or a cellular ecosystem, functioning abnormally. And all could be treated by therapeutic manipulations of cells. This revolution in cell biology is still in progress: it represents one of the most significant advances in science and medicine. Both panoramic and intimate, this is Siddhartha Mukherjee's most spectacular book yet. 'Brilliant ... medical magic' Daily Telegraph

This book helps power industry executives to systematically navigate the complex technological and organizational changes necessary to recreate power grids. This is especially pertinent in the current environment characterized by volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity conditions. Across the globe, the electric power sector is facing many forces of change as it transitions from a fossil-based system to cleaner sustainable resources. Leaders in the power sector face unprecedented challenges in responding to these changes while continuing to provide safe, reliable, clean, and affordable electricity. Recognizing that historical and existing ways will not work, Jagoron Mukherjee and Marco C. Janssen present a new paradigm for industry leaders to tackle some of the key questions to determine the best path forward: What will the business be like in the future? What technologies will likely prevail? How should my company respond to constant change? How expensive will the transition be? Will the customer expectations be met? How fast do we need to change? Drawing on well-known management principles, the book helps industry leaders to provide a methodology to tackle these questions and sharpen their decisions as they embrace innovation, new customer expectations and digitization in their efforts to steer the energy transition. Taking a holistic problem-solving approach, which addresses the power company as a whole, Recreating the Power Grid will be a valuable resource for all professionals working in this quickly evolving field.

This Handbook represents a pioneering effort to consolidate the state of knowledge on policy formulation. An invaluable resource for scholars and students of policy studies, this Handbook provides a set of analytical discussions that help scholars, students and practitioners better understand the multiple dimensions of what policy formulation has come to mean in contemporary public policy-making and governance. In attempting to resolve pressing public problems, governments devise, deploy and develop policy tools in many different ways in different sectors and jurisdictions. Knowledge of these processes has been fragmented, however, spanning a multitude of different approaches, perspectives and case studies. By critically and systematically analysing both the processes and agents of policy formulation, this Handbook provides the first comprehensive overview of the formulation activities that are undertaken by governments in order to match their policy goals with the means of achieving them. The Handbook unites a wide range of expert contributors who examine the roles played by policy actors, institutions and ideas in answering fundamental questions about policy formulation such as who undertakes it, how, when, where and why. Through seven thematic sections this Handbook discusses a wide range of topics related to formulation such as the nature of policy design, instrument choice, policy appraisal, policy advice and the politics of defining and resolving policy problems. Contributors include: C. Adelle, J. Bandola-Gill, R. Burroughs, C. Eichbaum, M. Galizzi, A. Gunn, H. Gunter, M.P. Howlett, H.M. Ingram, D.S.L. Jarvis, G.F. Johnson, P.D. Jorgensen, J. Kohoutek, C. Koski, M. Lehtonen, D. Linders, C. Lyall, L. Ma, M. Maor, C. Matheson, P.J. May, J.G. McGann, I. Mukherjee, S. Nair, M. Nekola, J. Rayner, A.L. Schneider, J. Scott, R. Shaw, A. Simons, N. Stramp, H. Strassheim, M. van der Steen, A. Vesely, J.-P. Voss, S. Weiland, M. Wilder, A.R. Zito

This book looks at conflict zones in the Asia Pacific with a special focus on secessionist groups/movements in the Indian Northeast, Tibet, Chinese Xinjiang, the Burmese borderlands, Kashmir in South Asia, CHT in Bangladesh, South Thailand, and Aceh in Indonesia. These conflict zones are predominantly ethnic minority provinces, which by and large do not share a sense of one-ness with the country that they are currently a part of; most of these insurgencies have had strong linkages with separatist nationalist groups in the region. Methodologically, the author uses extensive fieldwork, interview data, and participant observation from these conflict zones to take a bottom-up approach, giving importance to the voices of ordinary people and/or the residents of these conflict zones whose voices have generally been ignored. Although the book looks at both the historical background and contemporary dimensions of these conflicts, the author focuses on exploring how the role of race, ethnicity and religion in these conflicts can be both direct and indirect. This book will be of great interest to students and scholars of conflict and security in contemporary Asia with a background in politics, history, IR, security studies, religion, and sociology.

Business and the businessman have had a fundamental place in American society since the inception of the nation. This tenet, the 'gospel of wealth', is a central concern in the novels of Theodore Dreiser and his contemporaries. First published in 1987, this study sets this group of writers in their historical context and shows how they elaborated the idea of wealth as an object of quasi-religious quest. What had previously been associated with disease and darkness, avarice and dishonour, now came to emblematise the virtues of thrift, prudence and diligence. The underlying argument is that the dominant group of a society legitimises its power through the appropriation of the vocabulary of religion, and the American business leaders were successful in doing this both in their own practice and through the more insidious medium of art. A detailed analysis, this reissue will be of particular value to students of American literature with an interest in the relationship between linguistic symbols and social order, and historical attitudes towards wealth in literature.

Retailing is changing extremely rapidly in the emerging economies, both as a driver of social and economic change, and a consequence of economic development and the rise of consumer societies. Changes that took many decades in Europe or North America are happening at a much greater speed in emerging markets, while regulations continue to be hotly contested in these markets, raising questions about appropriate business strategies for both globalising firms and local contenders. While much has been written about retail in emerging markets, the focus has been primarily on the nature of entry strategies for Western retail companies. This book seeks to capture the impact of both internal and external regulations on retail development and strategy in emerging markets. It provides a comprehensive and up-to-date assessment of the development of retailing in a wide range of emerging economies, and seeks to capture the interplay between both retail policy and retail strategy and the theoretical implications of this on retail development as a whole. This book will be of interest to academics, researchers and advanced students with an interest in retail development in emerging markets, international business/strategy and international marketing.

This book maps South Asian theatre productions that have contextualised Ibsen’s plays to underscore the emergent challenges of postcolonial nation formation. The concerns addressed in this collection include politico-cultural engagements with human rights, economic and environmental issues, and globalization, all of which have evolved through colonial times and thereafter. This book contemplates why and how these Ibsen texts were repeatedly adapted for the stage, and consequently to reflect upon the political intent of this appropriative journey of the foreign playwright. This book tracks the unmapped agency that South Asian theatre has acquired through aesthetic appropriation of Ibsen, and thereby contributes to his global reception. This collection will be of great interest to students and scholars of theatre and performance studies.

India has moved along an impressive growth path over the last decade, marked with falling share of agriculture, stagnating manufacturing, expanding services segment, growing trade orientation, enhanced FDI inflows etc. The consequent growth implications are obvious as far as the numbers like GDP growth rate and Per Capita GDP trend are concerned, but how sustainable the associated development is with respect to resource management and environmental governance?

This book captures the economy-wide impacts of various activities on environment in India. The environmental impacts on water, air, soil quality and human health are captured through case studies from different parts of India. Analyzing separately the concern areas within agriculture (cultivation, aquaculture), manufacturing (industrial pollution, power generation), services (waste management, bio-medical waste, e-waste recycling) and external sector (agricultural trade, FDI inflow, trade in waste products) performance of India, the book attempts to find an answer to that crucial question. The methodology adopted to capture the environmental impacts of various economic activities is derived from the relevant branches like environmental economics, agricultural economics, and water resources economics. The book, focusing on particular sectors, indicates the concern areas and possible ways for enhancing environmental governance.

This volume is the first comprehensive exploration of Rabindranath Tagore’s works on education and pedagogy. It presents a valuable account of the creation of Santiniketan and Visva-Bharati, Tagore’s vision of social regeneration, and his rejection of the colonial scheme; while reflecting on significant events of his life and his ideas. The book evaluates Tagore’s unique contribution to education and discusses his views on fundamental issues, such as aim, method, discipline, and medium. It reinforces for readers today the relevance of his experiments and activities in the field of education. Drawing from various sources, the book also offers bibliographic information on Tagore’s writing on education. This new edition with a new Introduction and Foreword will be of immense value to educationists, teachers, policymakers, and those interested in modern Indian history and the philosophy of education.

This book analyzes different perspectives around sustainable development, risk management and managing demand across various sectors in India. Diverse theories and analytical methods from various disciplines, as well as case studies, are brought together to present an in-depth study. The book discusses the challenges of achieving sustainability, the role of quantitative research to assess current scenarios, and the role of policy making to bring improvements in the Indian context. It examines the socioeconomic ways of pursuing sustainable development in the areas of agriculture, climate change and energy; the environment and natural resources; health and society. It also analyzes important quantitative models for sustainability policy analysis and provides case studies to understand the practical implementations of the models. This book will be a great reference manual that covers a whole gamut of analytical techniques that are useful for students, research scholars and practitioners of economics, environmental studies, development studies, sociology, South Asian studies and public policy, among others.