Apoptosis and other hot links

I want to write about the wrongness of our course in Iraq but every time I start the topics and subtopics just seem to branch out endlessly in front of me. Fortunately, a friend wrote a very focused short piece a few days ago, "Wide of the Mark" at Daily Blague which has encouraged me not to abandon the idea entirely. As with most things I'm having trouble finishing I set the Iraq idea aside and started on something else. A search on "hubbert peak theory oil and gas" led to some very nice articles, but the best thing that turned up was Google Scholar. Google is good for news, views and products but most of the time it really falls down on science issues, very little useful material is returned. I'd been wanting to explore the idea of nicotine as cancer trigger for months but had not had much success and had set the idea aside until I got to a better medical library in Nashville later this year. Using Google Scholar on "nicotine cancer trigger" brought up a cellular biology term I just barely remembered, apoptosis, and also reminded me that I might better search on "nicotine carcenogensis genotoxcity" which was very productive and led to the very nice, recent and complete article, "Nicotine: Potentially a Multifunctional Carcinogen?" which gives a very satisfying answer to the general question of whether nicotine can trigger and promote cancer. Going back to apoptosis on regular Google we found "Apoptosis: Dance of Death" at Cells Alive. What a wonderful site Cells Alive is. I think going to school and/or doing research is a lot more fun now that it was thirty five or forty years ago, it's certainly more attractive. Seems like there was a war on then too. The war in Iraq is not like the war in Viet Nam, except for people dying, it will not respond to the same methods of protest as during my time in graduate school years ago. But it still needs to come to an end and needs to change its course soon. We definitely need to change the politicians soon also. Nothing like a little research in tetratogenicity of nicotine to focus ones mind, eh? Now, I wonder is teratogen an outdated term, is genotoxic a variant or a synonym?