This technology allowed us to solve some of the most fundamental puzzles in immunology. For instance, immunologists had long known that an organism can make billions of different types of antibodies to defend against infection, she says. The truth, as we and others discovered, lay somewhere in between. We found that there are only a few hundred antibody genes but they are encoded as bits and pieces which can re-combine in a myriad ways, thereby creating much greater diversity to fight infection. Most surprisingly, we found that chunks of DNA actually get deleted during this process.
All cells have a genetic program for death.
It s called apoptosis, a Greek word for leaves falling from a tree in autumn. The implications of this process for cancer biology came into sharp focus with Cory and her team s work on a gene called bcl-2, the gene responsible for the most common type of lymphoma, follicular lymphoma. In these tumours, bcl-2 is hooked up to an antibody gene, just like the myc gene in Burkitt s lymphoma. Before Cory and her team worked on bcl-2, the gene had been regarded as a mystery. Their work produced a paradigm shift in this area of genetics.