Baltimore never suspected that his discovery of RT would have such momentous impacts. And we found reverse transcriptase and could extrapolate from that a lot about how retroviruses pass their information. Some of the science that Baltimore is currently conducting involves cell suicide, or apoptosis. Along with colleagues at a laboratory that he still heads at MIT, Baltimore and fellow Caltech researchers recently reported how roundworms called nematodes kill off unwanted cells. The work is particularly intriguing because people have similar proteins to those that cause apoptosis in nematodes, and, in fact, researchers can substitute the human proteins for their nematode counterparts and still achieve apoptosis.
All cells contain the machinery to commit suicide.
His team reported that a common type of apoptosis involves three stable proteins found in nematode cells, proteins that are normally quiet but that can be triggered by death signals. All rights reserved.