ABSTRACT
Cells evolved originally as free-living individuals, and such cells still dominate the Earth and its oceans. But the cells that matter most to us, as human beings, are specialized members of a multicellular community. These cells have lost features needed for independent survival and acquired peculiarities that serve the needs of the body as a whole. Although they share the same genome, they are spectacularly diverse in structure, chemistry, and behavior. There are more than 200 different named cell types in the human body that collaborate with one another to form many different tissues, arranged into organs performing widely varied functions. To understand them, it is not enough to analyze cells in a culture dish: we need also to know how they live, work, and die in their natural habitat, the intact body.
