Although the phenomenon of cell death had been known for centuries, even briefly described in the 19th century, the explosion of research and technology in the latter half of the 20th century led to greater and more nuanced discoveries that have provided insights into many physiological processes including tissue development, maintenance, metabolism, and disease states including cancer. The many accomplishments in programmed cell death research have improved our understanding and development of targeted therapeutics, and some of these milestones were recognized by Nobel Prizes for apoptosis and autophagy. As scientists continue to elucidate new cell death pathways and their interplay with other pathways, let's take a look at what we know so far and what new findings have come out.

Having just moved a ludicrous amount of boxes and furniture into various U-Hauls and relocation tubes, I can feel all the literal weight of those decisions in my muscles and bones. Now that I'm back in Chicago, nursing my muscle soreness and the occasional bruise, I'm left thinking about the need for better muscular recovery and repair, which brings us to today's wonderful success story with an ABclonal customer as they added to our knowledge of myoblast differentiation and skeletal muscle development.

Having worked in a proteomics lab for my PhD dissertation, I had some familiarity with the tools and strategies used to study biology on a systems level. One of the concepts I was always interested in was the ability to just follow a protein's journey throughout the cell, from the time it is translated by the ribosome to its final destination either within an organelle or when it is secreted into the extracellular space. At the time I was finishing up, I wasn't sure that the technology was yet advanced enough to make that a reality, particularly if done within a single cell. But within the past few years, a new era of spatial proteomics has emerged to allow us to observe cell biology in a whole new light.

Just a few short weeks after the highly irreverent yet still important Ig Nobel Ceremony, the science community recognized the cream of its crop with the 2023 Nobel Prizes in the first full week of October. The dates for the official announcements are aligned with their usual order throughout the years, always announcing Physiology and Medicine first, then Physics, then Chemistry. The Nobel Committee will transition toward the Literature and Peace prizes to round out the week before Economics is announced on the following Monday. As usual, these prizes recognize a lifetime of work that has given the greatest benefit to humanity. Click the links to check out some of our picks for greatest Nobel science achievements as well a look at last year's Nobel winners, but here we go for this year's running tally of scientific legend.

I always look forward to this time of year, even more so sometimes than the actual Nobel Prizes, because I want to see what new insights can be derived from the weird science that, as they say, first makes you laugh, then think. That's right, now we are at the 33rd First Annual Ig Nobel Prizes! Just like last year and the few years before, the Ig Nobel ceremony was conducted virtually while the pandemic is still not quelled to an extent that allowed the organizers (men and women of science, see?) to be comfortable enough to have hundreds of people packed into a raucous arena, so the paper airplane tosses and everything else was pre-taped and released online. This did not take away from the absurdity and the few laugh-out-loud moments that I (and probably hundreds of thousands of science enthusiasts tuning in from around the globe) had during the 90-minute event. I do wonder if some of these might supplant my personal top ten, but maybe not just yet. Now let's see what happened!

I was recording a new BioChat (you should subscribe) recently with a professor at Harvard. We discussed gene therapy in passing for the disease he was studying, and one of the things that he brought up was the need to ensure that whatever therapy is designed has to be safe and effective. This of course is the promise and also the challenge of CRISPR-based research, in which the model is known but the targeting efficiency isn't where it needs to be in order to be of practical use in therapeutics. This is a big reason why the biomedical research world was abuzz with the recent announcement (and preprint) of a major discovery by scientists at the Broad Institute, where they characterized the mechanisms and the potential utility of a system similar to CRISPR in eukaryotes.