Elephants don’t have high incidences of cancer, and that’s weird.
That’s because cancer is a bunch of different conditions in which a cell starts replicating in an uncontrolled and dangerous fashion.
And thus you might very reasonably assume that things with more cells would be more prone to cancer, in the same way that you’d think someone with dozens of cobras would be more prone to snakebite.
Yet this doesn’t happen.
Elephants, for example, have about a 5 per cent rate of death by cancer compared with we stupid human beings who swing between about 11 and 25 per cent. In fact, it turns out that there’s absolutely no correlation between cancer incidence and the number of cells a creature has.
In other words, there’s something in elephants that lowers their cancer risk. And now we think we might have found it.
It’s a gene called TP53, and you have it in you right now. It’s a bit of biological code in your DNA that tracks changes in a cells and puts the hard word on any weirdness, telling the cell to either cut it out or die.
Elephants have it too, only they have ten times as many copies of it. And that means when a cell misbehaves, they have a team ready to put out the call to summon a genetic hitman BACK FROM THE DEAD!
Exactly like this.
See, there’s another gene, LIF6, which is a bit of a loose cannon which plays by its own rules. On the plus side, it’s a cancer killer. On the other hand, it also sometimes causes cancer, which seems… problematic.
So elephants have a neat trick: they have inactive copies of that gene which are activated by the TP53 genes when they detect cancerish behaviour in the cells. And then, like a zombie bounty hunter, LIF staggers to life, takes out the cancer and then returns to the genetic grave until duty once more demands it shamble into action.
It’s too soon to say whether this has any human applications, but let’s just repeat this: ELEPHANTS USE ZOMBIE GENES TO MURDER CANCER.
Goddamn, how cool is life?