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.