From One Cell: A Journey into Life's Origins and the Future of Medicine

Ben Stanger

Oct 2023 · Tantor Media Inc · Narrated by Noah James Butler

About this audiobook

Each of us began life as a single cell. From this humble origin, we embarked on a risky journey fraught with opportunities for disaster. Yet, amazingly, we reached our destination intact, emerging as dazzlingly complex, exquisitely engineered assemblages of trillions of cells. This metamorphosis constitutes one of nature's most spectacular yet commonplace magic tricks-and one of its most coveted secrets. In From One Cell, physician and researcher Ben Stanger offers a glimpse into what scientists are discovering about how life and the body take shape, and how these revelations stand to revolutionize medicine and the future of human health. Stanger leads listeners on a gripping odyssey retracing this universal, yet unremembered, rite of passage. Through the eyes of the scientists unraveling development's riddles in experiments as painstaking as they are inventive, we confront fascinating puzzles: how does the plethora of different tissues that compose our bodies arise from a single source? How do cells know what they are meant to become-skin or bone, blood or muscle-when all carry the same set of genetic instructions? Once a cell starts developing down one path, can it change its mind, or is its destiny sealed? As Stanger shows us, the answers to these questions may at last empower us to solve some of our most persistently confounding medical challenges.

About the author

Ben Stanger, MD, PhD, is the Hanna Wise Professor in Cancer Research and Professor of Medicine and Cell and Developmental Biology at the University of Pennsylvania. He is also a practicing gastroenterologist with Penn Medicine. He lives in the suburbs of Philadelphia.

Noah James Butler received his first taste of show business as an extra on an episode of Unsolved Mysteries, after which he began tirelessly pursuing any form of performance he could get himself into. His love of listening to old-time radio shows finally landed Noah in the realm of audiobooks.