These issues were authoritatively discussed in 1968, at the 22nd World Medical Assembly in Sydney, Australia. The assembly stated that “clinical interest lies not in the state of preservation of isolated cells but in the fate of a person. The point of death of the different cells and organs is not as important as the certainty that the process has become irreversible.” The statement had a profound effect on modern medical thinking. “Irreversible loss of function of the organism as a whole” became an accepted clinical criterion of death.
Semantic confusion may underlie some of the controversies outlined in this section. In many languages, including English, the word death may be used in various ways. The Concise Oxford Dictionary for instance defines death both as “dying” (a process) and as “being dead” (a state). Expressions such as “a painful death” and “a lingering death” show how often the word is used in the former sense. Many people are afraid of dying yet can face the prospect of being dead with equanimity. Another source of confusion that bedevils discussions about death is what the great English mathematician and philosopher Alfred North Whitehead called the “fallacy of misplaced concreteness.” This occurs when one treats an abstraction (however useful it may be to denote the behaviour or properties of objects under specific circumstances) as if it were itself a material thing. “O death, where is thy sting?” may be a searching metaphorical question, but such queries can only confuse the biologist. When the poet John Milton wrote of “the pain of death denounced, whatever thing death be,” the conceptual problem was of his own making.
The next two sections of this article illustrate these general principles concerning death from each end of the spectrum of living things: from the level of the cell and from that of the fully developed human being. Cell death
A vast amount of work has been devoted since the late 19th century to discovering how cells multiply. The study of how and why they die is a relatively recent concern: a rubric entitled “cell death” only appeared in the Index Medicus, an index to medical literature, in 1979.
What most textbooks of pathology describe as cell death is coagulative necrosis. This is an abnormal morphological appearance, detected in tissue examined under the microscope. The changes, which affect aggregates of adjacent cells or functionally related cohorts of cells, are seen in a variety of contexts produced by accident, injury, or disease. Among the environmental perturbations that may cause cell necrosis are oxygen deprivation (anoxia), hyperthermia, immunological attack, and exposure to various toxins that inhibit crucial intracellular metabolic processes. Coagulative necrosis is the classical form of cell change seen when tissues autolyze (digest themselves) in vitro.
But cells may die by design as well as by accident. Research in developmental pathology has stressed the biological importance of this other kind of cell death, which has been referred to as programmed cell death. In vertebrates it has been called apoptosis and in invertebrates, cell deletion. Programmed cell death plays an important role in vertebrate ontogeny (embryological development) and teratogenesis (the production of malformations), as well as in the spectacular metamorphoses that affect tadpoles or caterpillars. Such programmed events are essential if the organism as a whole is to develop its normal final form. Waves of genetically driven cell death are critical to the proper modeling of organs and systems. The inflections (curvatures) of the developing mammalian brain and spinal cord, for instance, or the achievement of a proper numerical balance between functionally related cell groups, cannot be understood without an appreciation of how the death of some (or many) cells is necessary for others to reach maturity. Localized cell death, occurring at precise moments during normal ontogeny, explains phenomena as varied as the fashioning of the digits or the involution of phylogenetic vestiges. Several congenital abnormalities can be attributed to disorders of programmed cell death. Cell death occurs spontaneously in normally involuting tissues such as the thymus. It can be initiated or inhibited by a variety of environmental stimuli, both physiological and pathological. Cell death even occurs in some of the cells of untreated malignant tumours, and it is seen during tumour regression induced by X rays or radiomimetic cytotoxic agents. Programmed cell death may also play a part in the process of aging, cells being designed to die after a certain number of mitotic divisions. Groups of cells responsible for the colour of human hair, for instance, may cease to function years before the hair itself loses the capacity to grow: the result is the “uncoloured” white hair of old age.
The two types of cell death—imposed from without or programmed from within—have different morphological features. Furthermore, different intracellular mechanisms have been incriminated in their production.
Necrosis is characterized by early swelling of the cytoplasm and of the mitochondria (energy-releasing organelles) within it. Later changes include the appearance of localized densities, possibly related to calcium deposition, in the matrix (ground substance) of the mitochondria. This is followed by the dissolution of other cytoplasmic organelles and the separation of affected cells from their neighbours through shearing of intercellular junctions. Nuclear alterations occur late and are relatively unremarkable. The nucleus swells, becomes darker (pyknosis), and ruptures (karyolysis) at about the same time as does the plasma membrane, the outer envelope of the cell. The basic mechanism of necrosis is thought to be a loss of control over cell volume, related to changes in the permeability of the cell membrane. These changes form the basis of several of the tests used to diagnose a necrotic cell in the laboratory. The affected membrane rapidly loses its ion-pumping capacity, and there are dramatic increases in the intracellular concentrations of sodium and calcium ions. This is followed by osmotic shock and the development of intracellular acidosis. The early injury to the mitochondria has profound repercussions on intracellular oxidative metabolism. The point of no return is reached with irreversible damage to mitochondrial structure and function. Later still, the lysosomes (membranous bags of hydrolytic enzymes found in most cells) rupture, releasing their acid enzymes into the cytoplasm of the cell. All this produces an ionic milieu unsuitable to the survival of the nucleus. Loss of the cell’s capacity to synthesize protein is the ultimate proof that it is functionally dead.
Programmed cell death usually affects scattered single cells. Early ultrastructural features are the disintegration of cell junctions and condensations of the cytoplasm. The cells shrivel up instead of swelling. Lumps of chromatin aggregate at the surface of the nucleus. The nuclear membrane develops folds, and the nucleus splits into a number of membrane-bound, ultrastructurally well-preserved fragments, which are shed and promptly taken up by specialized scavenger cells or even by ordinary cells in the neighbourhood. Energy-producing mitochondria are preserved until quite late. The nuclear changes seem to be energy-dependent; they may reflect the fact that genes in the nucleus are beginning to express themselves in new ways, in response to unknown stimuli. One of these responses seems to be the activation of endogenous endonucleases, enzymes in the cell nucleus that “suicidally” disrupt its cardinal functions.