Hayflick limit
The process of telomere shortening leads to apoptosis, the technical name given to programmed cell death. Although the Hayflick experiments were done on human cells in tissue culture, there is nothing special about human cells which would not be found in the cells of other living organisms. Apoptosis is thought to happen in all multicellular organisms. The 2002 Nobel Prize in Medicine was awarded to Sydney Brenner, H. Robert Horvitz and John E. Sulston for their work identifying genes that control apoptosis. The genes were found by studies in the nematode Caenorhabditis elegans. These same genes function in humans for apoptosis.