This year the Nobel Prize for Medicine goes to two British scientists - Sydney Brenner and Sir John Sulston, who will share the prize with US scientist Robert Horvitz. The scientists are being recognised for their work into how genes control the division of the body's cells and the development of organs. News of the award, worth 10m Swedish kroner, or just over $1m, was announced in Stockholm at the beginning of the week.

They discovered that specific genes control the cellular death program. Cell death is a normal process, both in the foetus and adult. The process maintains the appropriate number of cells in the tissues together with the process of new cells generation. In an adult human being, more than a thousand billion cells are created every day. At the same time, an equal number of cells die through a controlled "suicide process", referred to as programmed cell death. Detailed studies in the simple model organism - the nematode C. elegans - demonstrated that 131 of totally 1090 cells die reproducibly during development, and that this natural cell death is controlled by a unique set of genes.

The implications of the scientists' seminal discoveries are wide ranging and have shed new light on the pathogenesis of diseases such as Aids, strokes and heart attacks, where cells are lost because of excessive cell death.

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