+44 330 818 7254A fertilized mouse egg and a fertilized human egg are similar in size, yet they produce animals of very different sizes. What factors in the control of cell behaviour in humans and mice are responsible for these size differences? The same fundamental question can be asked for each organ and tissue in an animal's body. What factors in the control of cell behaviour explain the length of an elephant's trunk or the size of its brain or its liver? These questions are largely unanswered, at least in part because they have received relatively little attention compared with other questions in cell and developmental biology (Navarrete et al., 2017). It is nevertheless possible to say what the ingredients of an answer must be. The size of an organ or organism depends mainly on its total cell mass, which depends on both the total number of cells and the size of the cells. Cell number, in turn, depends on the amounts of cell division and cell death. Organ and body size are therefore determined by three fundamental processes: cell growth, cell division, and cell death. Each is independently regulated both by intracellular programs and by extracellular signal molecules that control these programs (Stryi?ski et al., 2020). By way of surface receptor molecules and internal surveillance mechanisms, the living cell receives information about its external environment and internal state. In light of this information, the cell must determine its most appropriate course of action under the circumstances and initiate the relevant response pathways. Typical responses include growth and division, sexual reproduction, movement, differentiation and programmed cell death. Similar to a digital computer that uses bistable electrical switches to store and process information, the living cell uses bistable biochemical switches to implement its decision-making capabilities. In this review article, we describe some of the lines of thought that led, over the last 50 years, to our current understanding of cellular information processing, particularly related to cell growth, division and death (Chang 1978).
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