1985, the cancer biologist Stanley Korsmeyer discovered that a gene named BCL2 is recurrently mutated in lymphomas.2 BCL2, it turned out, was the human counterpart to one of Horvitz’s death-regulating worm genes, called ced9. In worms, ced9 prevents cell death by sequestering the cell-death-related executioner proteins (hence the “un-dead” cells in the worm mutants). In human cells, the activation of BCL2 results in a cell in which the death cascade is blocked, creating a cell that is pathologically unable to die: cancer.
