Whales Rarely Get Cancer. Scientists Just Found Out Why, and It Might Come in a Pill.
Whales, beavers, and human centenarians all reveal something about DNA repair.
Bowhead whales are kind of awesome. They weigh more than 80,000 kilograms, roughly the weight of 14 elephants, live past 200 years, and have about a thousand times more cells dividing inside them than I do. Statistically, they should be drowning in cancer. But they rarely get it.
I went down a rabbit hole trying to figure out why, and here’s what I found.
In the full version you’ll get:
Why whale cells resist cancer
The tiny genetic difference that lets a beaver repair cell damage better than a mouse, and live twice as long
The compound already sold as a supplement that switches on the same repair gene in human cells
What an actual human trial testing this right now is measuring, and when we’ll know if it works
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