Death from inside out: an overview

Abstract

Although a type of cell death strategically suited to participating in developmental processes has been well known for nearly thirty years, it is only in the recent past that the extraordinary ubiquity of such death has been appreciated. Apoptosis, a term first employed to describe such death defined in structural terms, is associated with a stereotyped set of effector processes, and is driven by genes most of which are familiar as oncogenes or oncosuppressor genes. Dysregulation of apoptosis leads to diseases of enormous social importance such as cancer and AIDS.