Didn't early humans also rarely get cancer?<p>My understanding is that cancer is one of those things you die from if you don't die at child birth, get eaten by predators, or get the flu, polio, malaria, the plague, etc.<p>That is, the reason cancer is such a big deal in modern times is because other causes of death have been controlled.<p>I don't know much about elephants but I imagine cancer is still low on their list of things to worry about (humans are probably a lot higher up) If they started living a lot longer, it would probably show up more.<p>People under 40-50 also rarely get cancer. Although I'm sure the human environment has produced some more causes of it that make those rates higher than they used to be.
This is a MUCH better explanation: <a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25459141" rel="nofollow">https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25459141</a><p>Killing off the misbehaving cells is an obvious solution but this must also shorten the organisms lifespan via organ failure.<p>You only get so many divisions from the zygote before a cell line must be killed off, put into senescence, or it starts malfunctioning due to accumulated mutations (~60). A good solution produces as many differentiated functional cells as possible while minimizing divisions from the zygote.<p>Really, this article shows a fundamental misunderstanding of how our bodies work.
Pulled from the comments (which are remarkably smart):<p>"Upregulated p53 activity in humans is implicated in Huntington's disease. Which makes sense, since the symptoms involve early death of brain cells. So this isn't a panacea in itself. But as we learn more of the gene regulatory networks involved, we may be able to develop something much more fine-tuned that has the benefits without the costs." - Suzanne Sadedin
<i>"Mouse cells given extra copies of the p53 gene seemed to develop some cancer resistance, he said."</i><p>I wonder if they could try putting it in to tasmanian devils, which have suffered enormous cancer rates recently.
> <i>He hopes to have a clinical trial within the next three to five years.</i><p>It's been just over 4 years since that article. I wonder what has happened since.
> The work has already given him a new tool when he talks with his patients.<p>> “When I have a patient in front of me diagnosed with the syndrome, they will almost certainly get cancer,” he said. “But in that moment I’m able to tell them elephants don’t get cancer and we are working with the zoo and the circus to learn from elephants so one day you never have to get cancer.”<p>This seems a bit unethical to raise hope for a cure that statistically has a very low chance of passing clinical trials
Just a hypothesis I thought of:<p>A lot of cancer cells are developed because of constant background radiation, if you get older you just were exposed to more of it.<p>Elephants have a much higher volume to be affected by it, so just from an evolutionary perspective they had to develop a better resistance. The ones who got cancer early couldn't reproduce as well.<p>Does that make sense? Or does the article say exactly that?
Do humans happen to get more cancer than other animals? There’s this weird idea, I forget the source, that a less efficient cell garbage collection mutation allowed increased brain development, connections, etc... but at the cost of increased cancer, depression, ego, etc...
An old video [1] in response to this old article may indicate another reason why elephants dont get cancer, and provide easier way to replicate those results than gene therapy or splicing. Hint: go vegan.<p>[1] <a href="https://nutritionfacts.org/video/how-not-to-die-from-cancer/#transcript" rel="nofollow">https://nutritionfacts.org/video/how-not-to-die-from-cancer/...</a>