What Your Cells Know About Sacrifice

Every day, without your awareness or consent, somewhere between 50 and 70 billion of your own cells choose to die. Scientists call it apoptosis — a word borrowed from the Greek for "falling leaves." First described in a landmark 1972 paper by pathologists John Kerr, Andrew Wyllie, and Alastair Currie, apoptosis is programmed cell death: a built-in biological process by which healthy, functioning cells receive a molecular signal, begin to dismantle themselves from the inside out, and quietly disappear — not because they are sick or broken, but because the body needs them gone in order to remain whole.…