This finding, he suggests, helps link the study of cell death in the worm and oncogenesis in people. "There were a number of papers that had suggested a relationship between cell death and oncogenesis, but it was this tie between ced-9 and bcl-2 that really put the nail in the coffin," comments Horvitz.
Results described in the paper more generally suggest that the molecular mechanism of programmed cell death has been conserved evolutionarily from worms to mammals. "Concerning evolutionary universality, there are two additional striking observations beyond the similarity between ced-9 and bcl-2 reported in the paper: One is that when human bcl-2 is put into a worm it protects against cell death. That experiment was first published by David Vaux at Stanford University [D.L. Vaux et al., Science, 258:1955-7, 1992] and was repeated by us using a different assay.
"We took this finding a step further. We showed that ...
