In a healthy, multicellular system, cells appear to know what they are doing. They form an altruistic society, or so it seems ? and when their time comes, they commit suicide. The latter is a human emotional interpretation of a natural course of events, certainly overdramatized. This assumed altruism gets thoroughly lost in malignant growth; there is never enough cell death (of the right kind), and oncologists consider the only good cancer cell a dead cancer cell. Every means to achieve this end is legitimate. We are, however, still ignorant about the forces that bring about selective, discriminating apoptosis and the following mini-review illustrates only a minute part of this complex process.
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