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INTERNAL AND EXTERNAL DEATH PROMPTS. "At another level, each individual cell may be considered as a complex entity, a 'society' by itself, a mingling of heterogeneous organelles and components that behaves as a whole. And self-destruction can occur not only as a response to signals originating from the outside environment of the cell, but also from its inside environment." http://www.nature.com/cdd/journal/v9/n4/full/4400950a.html View in LinkedIn

SOCIAL CONNECTIVITY AND DEATH. "But the permanent coupling of each cell fate to the nature of the interactions it can establish with the collectivity to which it belongs, represents only one dimension of the 'social control' of cell survival and cell death." http://www.nature.com/cdd/journal/v9/n4/full/4400950a.html View in LinkedIn

ADAPTIVE PLASTICITY OF SOMA. "This very frailty, this permanent reprieve and the interdependence they generate between our cells, are one of the bases of our perennity and our plasticity, allowing our bodies to build themselves, to constantly reconstruct, and to adapt to ever changing environments." http://www.nature.com/cdd/journal/v9/n4/full/4400950a.html View in LinkedIn

SO ENDS this reflection of Denis Nobel’s provocative thinking that rocks the boat of the central dogma of molecular biology and Neo-Darwinism. It is the nature of Khunian scientific revolutions that knowledge itself continues to evolve, often through a series of upheavals and periods of extreme resistance to new ideas. But in the end, per the adage, we see further because we stand on the shoulders of giants. View in LinkedIn

TWO WAY CAUSATION IS REAL. “The question is not whether downward causation of the kind discussed in this article exists, it is rather how best to incorporate it into biological theory and experimentation.” http://rsfs.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/2/1/55 View in LinkedIn

SOCIAL REGULATION OF DEATH. ""The emergence of a genetic program allowing a social form of regulation of cell survival and cell death, through a process of 'altruistic' cell suicide, has been considered as one of the solutions that evolution has provided to the specific problem of multicellular bodies and attributed to the selective pressure that applied to the emergence of multicellularity, including a process of kin selection between cells sharing the same genome and condemned to live together." http://www.nature.com/cdd/journal/v9/n4/full/4400950a.html View in LinkedIn

QUESTIONS. "The first multicellular animals and plants belonging to the eukaryote terminal crown group are believed to have appeared around 0.7 to more than one billion years ago. Were they the first living beings whose cells were endowed with the capacity to self-destruct? Were effectors of cell suicide already present and operational in the first multicellular animals and plants, or were they selected later from other ancestral signaling pathways? When did the capacity to self-destruct initially appear?" http://www.nature.com/cdd/journal/v9/n4/full/4400950a.html View in LinkedIn

SELF-DESTRUCTION KEY TO EVOLUTION. ""The observation that plant cells share with animal cells the capacity to self-destruct in response to environmental changes and cell signaling has reinforced the idea that programmed cell death may have played an essential role in the development, survival and evolution of most, if not all, multicellular organisms." http://www.nature.com/cdd/journal/v9/n4/full/4400950a.html View in LinkedIn

CONSERVATION AND DIVERSITY. "As frequently occurs during evolution, however, this striking conservation in both sequences and functional properties has been associated with a great level of diversification." http://www.nature.com/cdd/journal/v9/n4/full/4400950a.html View in LinkedIn

FAMILIES OF GENES. "During the last nine years, homologues of genes involved in the regulation of programmed cell death in Caenorhabditis elegans have been identified in sponge, in Hydra vulgaris, in the fruitfly Drosophila melanogaster, in zebrafish, in mice and in humans." http://www.nature.com/cdd/journal/v9/n4/full/4400950a.html View in LinkedIn