Mukherjee authored three books before The Song of the Cell. The first is The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer (2010), which won the 2011 Pulitzer Prize in general nonfiction. This book examines the history of cancer from its first identification in ancient Egypt some 4,600 years ago as well as the quest to find cures. In his second book, The Laws of Medicine: Field Notes from an Uncertain Science (2015), Mukherjee focuses on three crucial elements of medicine: intuition, statistical outliers, and human bias. His third book is The Gene: An Intimate History (2017). In it, he explores the hunt to decode and decipher the gene, which is the code of life. Through these three books, Mukherjee established himself as not only a prolific scholar but also an excellent science communicator. In each of his three books, he explains extremely complex issues through personal narratives, experiments, and history so that the topics are understandable to scholars and non-scholars alike.

As Mukherjee notes, his fourth book, The Song of the Cell, “takes us on a very different journey” (14) compared to his other books. Three articles he wrote for The New Yorker magazine served as the origin of The Song of the Cell.