Apoptosis -- the story so far....

The process of programmed cell death, or apoptosis, has become one of the most intensively studied topics in biological sciences in the last two decades. Apoptosis as a common and universal mechanism of cell death, distinguishable from necrosis, is now a widely accepted concept after the landmark paper by Kerr, Wyllie and Currie in the early seventies [1]. Different components of the death machinery in eukaryotes are discussed in this issue.