Cell Death Nets 2002 Nobel Prize in Medicine

An anonymous reader writes "The recent press release at the Nobel website details the first of the 2002 Nobel Prizes. This year the Medicine prize goes to Sydney Brenner, H. Robert Horvitz, and John E. Sulston for their discovery of programmed cell death (also called apoptosis). Their seminal work in the model organism C. elegans established the foundation of cell suicide as a normal physiologic process. The implications are wide ranging including understanding organ development and cancer."

Comments

To nitpick a bit

[Otter]

...Sydney Brenner, H. Robert Horvitz, and John E. Sulston for their discovery of programmed cell death (also called apoptosis).

To be precise, the Horvitz lab at MIT discovered apoptosis. Brenner and Sulston were honored for their roles in establishing C. elegans as an experimental system.

Why study a nematode, you ask? They're small, transparent (so they don't need to be dissected) and are self-fertilizing. Most interestingly, they have a precise number of cells that arise from an entirely predictable series of divisions and deaths, making it easy to pick out genes that affect that process.

Re:ever living cells

[Idarubicin]

i wonder if it would be possible to "reprogram" these cells to have an infinite life span.

Sure. It happens naturally.

Usually, we call it cancer.

Re:ever living cells

[Daniel Dvorkin]

If you can answer that question, you'll be getting the next Nobel Prize in Medicine or Physiology. "What makes us age?" is one of those deceptively simple questions in biology, like "How do proteins fold?" that seems like it should be simple to answer but turns out to be fractal in its complexity -- the closer you look, the more details emerge, and the closer you look at those details ... etc.

Wonder when most shrinks will wake up to this

[Elwood P Dowd]

Evolutionary psychology has pointed out that it is possible for suicide to be evolutionarily advantageous. If my existance makes it less likely that my genes will be replicated, then it would be evolutionarily advantageous for me to kill myself.

For example, if I am a large drain on my family, and I'll never be able to have children, and I'll just make it harder for my siblings to get by, then my existence will make it harder for my (siblings) genes to be replicated.

Of course, this is almost never actually the case. But it makes sense that perhaps it used to be, when we didn't have such a easy time surviving. Now those same urges, that may have made sense when most people died by the time they were 30, are completely out of place.

Same basic concept.

Evolutionary psychology = Bollocks

[MosesJones]

Like anything Evolutionary (Sociology, Politics etc etc) arena except Biology there is one uniting factor in the application of Evolution theory to another area. It doesn't make sense, and is founded on the standard lack of understanding of science found throughout the fluffy subjects, as Rutherford said

"All research in the social sciences can be summed up by the phrase 'some do, some don't'.

To mention on the same page as Noble Prize winners a bunch of mumbo-jumbo just shows what an unscientific world we live in.