Before revision:  Our results strongly suggest a role for Fas and other death receptors in generating robust threshold switching between coherent life and death states. Discussion includes an analogy with ferromagnetism and the generalization of self-stabilization to other apoptotic complexes such as the apoptosome .
After revision:  Our results strongly suggest a role for Fas and other death receptors in deciding cell fate and add to the signal processing capabilities attributed to receptor clustering .