History of apoptosis research
Open-knowledge reference entry
Apoptosis is the process of programmed cell death. From its early conceptual beginnings in the 1950s, it has exploded as an area of research within the life sciences community. As well as its implication in many diseases, it is an integral part of biological development.
Early research, and the "worm people" at Cambridge
Sydney Brenner's studies on animal development began in the late 1950s in what was to become the Laboratory of Molecular Biology (LMB) in Cambridge, UK. It was at this lab that during the 1970s and 1980s, a team led by John Sulston succeeded in tracing the nematode Caenorhabditis elegans entire embryonic cell lineage. In other words, Sulston and his team had traced where each and every cell in the roundworm's embryo came from during the division process, and where it ended up.
H. Robert Horvitz arrived from the US at the LMB in 1974, where he collaborated with Sulston. Both would share the 2002 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Brenner, and Horvitz would go back to the US in 1978 to establish his own lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Brenner's original interests were centered in genetics and in the development of the nervous system, but cell lineage and differentiation inevitably led to the study of cell fate:
One aspect of the cell lineage particularly caught my attention: in addition to the 959 cells generated during worm development and found in the adult, another 131 cells are generated but are not present in the adult. These cells are absent because they undergo programmed cell death - Horvitz: "Worms, Life and Death," 2002.
Programmed cell death had been known long before "the worm people" began to publish their celebrated findings.
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This entry incorporates text from “History of apoptosis research” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.