ABSTRACT
In this chapter, we introduce the phenomena of cell cycle control and programmed cell death in multicellular organisms and discuss how disruption in either of these can lead to the disease called cancer . Our discussion so far in this book has focussed on two aspects of cell division: (i) replication of the contents of the cell; and (ii) the actual partitioning of these replicated contents between the two daughter cells when the cell divides. However, there is yet another aspect of cell division that is crucially important, namely, the mechanism by which the cell controls the different chronological steps that are involved in cell division.
