Biologists know death is part of life. Howard Robert Horvitz knows that, for cells, so is suicide.

Horvitz, who won the Nobel Prize in Physiology of Medicine along with research partners Sydney Brenner and John Sulston in 2002, delivered the sixteenth Annual Ef Racker Lecture on Thursday to a packed Call Auditorium. The lecture, “Cell Suicide: Programmed Cell Death in Development and Disease,” outlined the history of modern biology’s understanding of cellular death.