Phenoptosis (from pheno: showing or demonstrating; ptosis: programmed death, "falling off") is a conception of the self-programmed death of an organism proposed by Vladimir Skulachev in 1999.
In many species, including salmon and marsupial mice, under certain circumstances, especially following reproduction, an organism's genes will cause the organism to rapidly degenerate and die off. Recently this has been referred to as "fast phenoptosis" as aging is being explored as "slow phenoptosis".[1] Phenoptosis is a common feature of living species, whose ramifications for humans is still being explored. The concept of programmed cell death was used before, by Lockshin & Williams[2] in 1964 in relation to insect tissue development, around eight years before "apoptosis" was coined. The term 'phenoptosis' is a neologism associated with Skulachev's proposal.