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Science 21 February 1997:
Vol. 275. no. 5303, pp. 1081 - 1082
DOI: 10.1126/science.275.5303.1081
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Perspectives

Pierre Golstein

Cells can die in two ways: in a disorderly, destructive process called necrosis or by programmed cell death (or apoptosis), an orderly series of biochemical events that neatly eliminate the cell. Four reports in this week's issue by Chinnaiyan (p. 1122), Wu (p. 1126), Yang (p. 1129), and Kluck (p. 1132) elucidate two critical steps in the biochemical cascade of programmed cell death. In his Perspective, Golstein describes how these demonstrations--that the Caenorhabditis elegans protein CED-4 directly contacts CED-3 and CED-9 and that Bcl-2 causes release of cytochrome c from mitochondria--advance our understanding of programmed cell death.

The author is at the Centre d'Immunologie INSERM-CNRS de Marseille-Luminy, Case 906, 13288 Marseille Cedex 9, France. E-mail: golstein{at}ciml.univ-mrs.fr

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Science. ISSN 0036-8075 (print), 1095-9203 (online)