
Elephants Rarely Get Cancer, Now We Know Why (2015) - Osiris30
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/d-brief/2015/10/08/elephants-cancer-genes/
======
chubot
Didn't early humans also rarely get cancer?

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.

That is, the reason cancer is such a big deal in modern times is because other
causes of death have been controlled.

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.

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.

~~~
londons_explore
Prehistoric human lifetime is very hard to estimate, but I have heard reports
that while infant mortality was high, actual lifetimes could still reach 70+
years

~~~
luc4sdreyer
It's true that life expectancy used to be very low due to very high infant
mortality, but even after that it wasn't easy going:

> Based on Neolithic and Bronze Age data, the total life expectancy at 15
> would not exceed 34 years. Based on the data from modern hunter-gatherer
> populations, it is estimated that at 15, life expectancy was an additional
> 39 years (total 54), with a 0.60 probability of reaching 15.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_expectancy#Variation_over...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_expectancy#Variation_over_time)

~~~
anovikov
That's in the times when agriculture became a thing. It meant that people
lived in a very crowded way where the limited tracts of very fertile land was,
settled and with very poor sanitation. Infections were rampant, and famines in
poor crop years, common. Hunter-gatherers had it much better - except there
were a lot fewer of them.

------
nonbel
This is a MUCH better explanation:
[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25459141](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25459141)

Killing off the misbehaving cells is an obvious solution but this must also
shorten the organisms lifespan via organ failure.

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.

Really, this article shows a fundamental misunderstanding of how our bodies
work.

~~~
eloff
So just waving away the insane technology leaps required, if we had a digital
copy of our DNA we could theoretically create pristine new stem cells and
inject them into our bodies as needed to replace aging cells. You might make
such a master copy at birth, or more likely in such a world, you're conceived
from the master copy which your parents carefully edited before deciding to
have you.

Fundamentally we could live a really long time in the far future, which is
maybe closer to us today than we are to 0 A.D.

~~~
nonbel
The "master copy" would be at conception. Even after a few divisions it is
unlikely any of the cells carry the exact same DNA.

And just because you made it from zygote to birth does not mean your master
copy was "pristine".

But yeah, if you could somehow replace your tissue stem cells in situ with
ones that are closer to the original state it would generally allow your body
to continue functioning for much longer. I mean some of those mutations could
be beneficial to your particular environment too, but in general... Yeah.

~~~
neetdeth
You don’t have any single non-degraded copy but you do have billions of
degraded copies. Assuming errors are non-correlated, one ought to be able to
reconstruct the original sequence given enough of them.

The idea would be to use some far-future technology to enable a kind of DNA
repair that cells themselves can’t do, using non-local information from other
cells in the organism.

~~~
nonbel
Most mutations are probably large scale chromosomal missegregation, etc where
huge chunks get moved around or duplicated/deleted rather than just
replacing/removing/adding a single nucleotide. From what I have read something
like that happens about once every 10 divisions per cell line.

So I think that could be more difficult than you expect.

~~~
eloff
I think the same statistical methods apply to cancel the noise.

~~~
nonbel
I doubt it, it isn't like the average is going to correspond to the actual
original sequence.

------
herf
Pulled from the comments (which are remarkably smart):

"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

------
pmoriarty
_" Mouse cells given extra copies of the p53 gene seemed to develop some
cancer resistance, he said."_

I wonder if they could try putting it in to tasmanian devils, which have
suffered enormous cancer rates recently.

~~~
TheSpiceIsLife
I live in Tasmania :)

That’s a great idea.

Also, I advocate to make endangered animals legal to keep as pets.

Look how successful cats and dogs are.

~~~
beerandt
You'd have to domesticate them. And then it's a philosophical question of if
they're even Tasmanian Devils anymore.

After all, the success of dogs didn't do anything to prevent the near
extinction of the wolf.

~~~
Smithalicious
There are many pets that aren't domesticated like fish, snakes, tarantulas.

That's not to say that Tasmanian devils are docile enough to be that kind of
pet, though.

~~~
beerandt
True, but...

Part of what makes the cancer so transmissible with Tasmanian devils is their
predisposition for biting each other, especially on the face, well past the
point of drawing blood.

I mean, they're not called devils because they're red with horns.

------
computator
> _He hopes to have a clinical trial within the next three to five years._

It's been just over 4 years since that article. I wonder what has happened
since.

------
mkonecny
> The work has already given him a new tool when he talks with his patients.

> “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.”

This seems a bit unethical to raise hope for a cure that statistically has a
very low chance of passing clinical trials

------
dang
Previous elephant cancer threads:

2017:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14698886](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14698886)

2015:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10364196](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10364196)

~~~
zeristor
Next one due in 2021

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ganzuul
Do other large mammals have similar cancer resistance?

How many cells does a blue whale have?

~~~
Jun8
Able to answer this since I just read an article on this in the _Economist_
([https://www.economist.com/science-and-
technology/2019/06/29/...](https://www.economist.com/science-and-
technology/2019/06/29/in-fighting-cancer-look-to-what-other-animals-do)): It
seems whale genes have evolved to supress cancer. These include ATR
([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ataxia_telangiectasia_and_Rad3...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ataxia_telangiectasia_and_Rad3_related))
that senses DNA damade, AMER1
([https://ghr.nlm.nih.gov/gene/AMER1](https://ghr.nlm.nih.gov/gene/AMER1)),
which stifles cell growth, and RECK
([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RECK](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RECK)),
which suppresses metastatis.

These genes are also found in humans but the hope is that studying genes from
animals like elephants and whales we can find ones that we don't have.

------
sek
Just a hypothesis I thought of:

A lot of cancer cells are developed because of constant background radiation,
if you get older you just were exposed to more of it.

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.

Does that make sense? Or does the article say exactly that?

~~~
dean177
Why not have a read and find out?

~~~
baq
Validating your hypotheses? How quaint!

------
gigatexal
Could we use CRISPR to copy this gene more times in humans then?

~~~
bransonf
Yea, we probably don’t want to do that. Over-expression has a tendency to
compete with other regulatory genes, enabling the reverse of what we’d aim to
achieve.

[0][http://m.cshperspectives.cshlp.org/content/2/2/a001107.full](http://m.cshperspectives.cshlp.org/content/2/2/a001107.full)
[1][https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/m/pubmed/18812169/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/m/pubmed/18812169/)

------
dlwdlw
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...

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datavirtue
Because they aren't stuffing thier necks with sugar, pounds of meat, and
dairy? Perhaps the reason they aren't ruining our climate either.

~~~
otabdeveloper4
Well, it's either "pounds of meat and dairy" or "sugar", you need one or the
other because humans can't feed on sunlight yet.

~~~
spaginal
If you don’t eat, you won’t die of cancer clearly, starvation yes, but
definitely not cancer.

------
RickJWagner
Because they can't open cigarette packages?

------
mikehotel
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.

[1] [https://nutritionfacts.org/video/how-not-to-die-from-
cancer/...](https://nutritionfacts.org/video/how-not-to-die-from-
cancer/#transcript)

~~~
D-Coder
Do human vegans get less cancer? (Honest question.)

~~~
mikehotel
There are studies on this, however they are controversial since diet is not
easy to control amongst study subjects. Also, there are vested interests
keeping public opinion divided on this matter.

One study from 2014:
[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3565018/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3565018/)
This compared non-vegetarians with multiple types of vegetarian diets.

> Conclusion: Vegetarian diets seem to confer protection against cancer.

> Impact: Vegan diet seems to confer lower risk for overall and female-
> specific cancer compared to other dietary patterns. The lacto-ovo-vegetarian
> diets seem to confer protection from cancers of the gastrointestinal tract.

A more recent perspective on the topic of diet as a cancer risk:
[https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/01635581.2017.1...](https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/01635581.2017.1339094)

> Abstract: The role that nutrition plays in cancer development and treatment
> has received considerable attention in recent decades, but it still
> engenders considerable controversy. Within the cancer research and
> especially the clinical community, for example, nutritional factors are
> considered to play, at best, a secondary role. The role of nutrition in
> cancer development was noted by authorities as far back as the early 1800s,
> generally under the theory that cancer is "constitutional" in its origin,
> implying a complex, multifactorial, multistage etiology. Opponents of this
> idea insisted, rather vigorously, that cancer is a local unifactorial
> disease, best treated through surgery, with little attention paid to the
> etiology and possible prevention of cancer. This "local" theory, developed
> during the late 1700s and early 1800s, gradually included, in the late 1800s
> and early 1900s, chemotherapy and radiotherapy as treatment modalities,
> which now remain, along with surgery, as the basis of present-day cancer
> treatment. This highly reductionist paradigm left in its wake unfortunate
> consequences for the present day, which is the subject of this perspective.

(I am citing the second publication only in defense of my original comment,
for future reference. In retrospect, when discussing health benefits of diet,
I should have used the term whole food plant based diet instead of vegan to
avoid the baggage that term carries.)

