Elan vital, elan Ietal: one life but multiple deaths

摘要

When Richard Lockshin coined the expression 'programmed cell death' (PCD), more than 40 years ago, he modestly and accurately described the unique morphological and biochemical features of a developmental cell-death process that affected the intersegmental muscles of silk-moths. En passage, he developed the important notion that PCD would be controlled by a combination of cell-extrinsic and cell-intrinsic factors, yet would be executed through a plethora of genetically controlled catabolic reactions, from inside of the self-destroying cell. In retrospect, it is hard to believe that Richard did not foresee that his discovery - a mixture of dedicated and inventive bench work and visionary extrapolation - would be one of the major breakthroughs in cell biology of the 20th century. More interestingly, the process he observed was not apoptosis but one of the emerging new mechanisms of PCD, in a story that is now just unfolding