Every day, your body quietly sacrifices tens of billions of cells, and you are alive because of it. A tadpole loses its tail, a hand sheds its webbing, and a cancer cell refuses to follow the same rules. Who pulls the trigger? This gripping introduction explains how cell death turned out to be a built-in, regulated part of life. It will delight curious readers who want real science without the jargon.

Follow a tiny transparent worm from a compost heap to the Nobel Prize. Meet Sydney Brenner, John Sulston, and Robert Horvitz, who discovered that exactly 131 cells in every worm die on schedule, and that genes control the process. Then watch the story leap to humans, uncovering molecular scissors called caspases, the Bcl-2 guardians of survival, and a surprising second career for a protein in the cell's power plant.

Short, vivid, and built around a single compelling mystery, The Death Switch shows how basic curiosity about a worm became medicine. It reveals how drugs like venetoclax reawaken death in cancer cells, and it explains clearly why too little or too much dying lies behind some of our most feared diseases.

The Death Switch

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