April 2  Bill Clark,  UCLA Molecular, Cellular, and Developmental Biology
Sex and the Origins of Death
Compulsory death is a relatively late development after the appearance of life on earth. The evolutionary forces leading to its selection and maintenance have been something of a mystery, given the way natural selection ordinarily works. A tracing of the evolutionary origins of programmed cell death, one of the major contributors to cellular senescence and organismal death, provides some interesting insights into this question, and the relationship of compulsory death to sex, segregation of DNA, and breathing corrosive oxygen.