Baby don't hurt me...

Leaving ethical and philosophical argument aside, for the greater good of the body/person, each cell within us is capable of committing suicide. There's an elaborate system of cellular machinery within each and every cell that will quietly kill the cell, if sensors of that cell-death machinery are triggered. The rationalization is that if something bad happens to or within that cell, it would rather die than to mutate or act in ways that would hurt the rest of the body.

Failure of such system can be one potential cause of cancer. For example, DNA modified by radiation that mutated the gene to either nonfunctional form (in the case of an anti-tumorigenic gene) or to an overactive form (gain of function in a proto-oncogene), that cell undergoing multiple mutations will lead to a "cancerous" state. Usually, self-check or by immune cell surveillance would detect this change and the cell is either self-induced to die (by apoptosis) or to be killed by immune cells. This way, the irradiation damage is limited, contained within that one dead cell and not be spread, or to affect other nearby cells.

In fact, most cells in the body are "programmed" to die by default without the proper growth factors and other environmental factors. This self-induced death is quiet in the sense that nearby cells or local immune cells will clear the debris without causing inflammation; i.e., the death is quiet but not silent. The same molecular machinery within cells that are used to die, as it turns out, I discover that they can be used for functions other than cell death. There's a growing corpus of literature that shows these cell death enzymes are used for both physiologic and pathologic functions without leading to cell death.

The importance of this discovery can be categorized at multiple levels. At the epistemological level, there is a distinct connection between form and function. Cell lives and dies by changing its form. At the scientific level, this provides a novel insight into mechanisms of cellular differentation, fusion, fission, chemotaxis, apoptosis, proliferation and growth. At the medical level, we can deduce how the body regulates both normal (physiologic) and in response to disease/injury/harm (pathologic) activities using the same set of enzymes. This would provide a list of candidate targets for drug development.