A mysterious cell process named anastasis (Greek for "rising to life") challenges our idea of life being a linear march towards death, and suggests that cell death can actually be reversed under certain conditions—essentially allowing cells to un-die. [...]
Every day, the billions of cells in our bodies actively decide whether they should continue to live, or die. Damaged cells must die—otherwise we might get cancer or other diseases—through programmed cell death processes, the most famous of which is apoptosis (from the Greek for "falling off").
"There are many cells that we don't want to die. This is particularly true for the neurons in our brain, which have to last our whole life, or the cells for our heart," Montell explained. A careful balance must be struck: if too many cells die we'd develop diseases like Alzheimer's or Parkinson's, a hallmark of which is neuronal cell death. [...]
If it turns out that anastasis is the process responsible for cancer coming back after remission, she said, it would be "an unfortunate byproduct" of a process the researchers assume evolved to heal tissues after severe but sublethal injury. "That's not a brand new idea: cancer as a wound that won't heal, or an ongoing, never-terminating wound-healing response."
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