So you want to be an intelligence analyst. Students occasionally write to me and ask for advice on getting a job in the Intelligence Community. (I became an intelligence analyst at DIA after undergrad. I was there for about three years, and after that, I did a few years of consulting for various intel agencies.) The below is a gist of that advice. It is heavily biased by my own experience, and none of the below is meant to be universal.
Apoptosis, or programmed cell death, is a naturally occurring process in the body. It involves a controlled sequence of steps in which cells signal self termination. Apoptosis works to keep the body's natural cell division process of mitosis in check.
An oncogene is a gene that has the potential to cause cancer. In tumor cells, they are often mutated or expressed at high levels. Most normal cells will undergo a programmed form of rapid cell death (apoptosis) when critical functions are altered. Activated oncogenes can cause those cells designated for apoptosis to survive and proliferate instead. Most oncogenes require an additional step, such as mutations in another gene, or environmental factors, such as viral infection, to cause cancer.