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.
Illustration of how a normal cell is converted to a cancer cell, when an oncogene becomes activated. 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.