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History with David Rubenstein

Siddhartha Mukherjee

In the late 1600s, separated by the North Sea, English polymath Robert Hooke and Dutch cloth-merchant Antonie van Leeuwenhoek looked through their handmade microscopes. What they saw introduced a radical concept that swept through biology and medicine: complex living organisms are made up of tiny, self-contained, self-regulating units. Hooke christened them “cells.”

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