Bowhead whales live over 200 years without getting cancer at rates you'd expect. They produce massive amounts of a protein called CIRBP that protects DNA. Scientists gave the whale version to flies and they lived longer with better DNA repair.
This whale can live over 200 years, and that's not even the craziest part. Let me introduce you to something called Peeto's Paradox. It describes the oddity that this massive whale, despite weighing as much as a loaded airplane and having roughly 1,000 times more cells than a human, it has remarkably low risk of cancer. Here's why that's really strange, because cancer arises in part when cells divide. They copy their DNA, and this gives an opportunity to accumulate genetic errors, which is the basis of cancer. So if this animal has 1,000 times more cells than you or me, lives for centuries, why is it not getting cancer? The answer appears to lie in its DNA repair machinery. Bowhead whale produces extraordinarily high levels of a protein called CIRBP, which helps protect cells from DNA damage. When errors occur, they appear to be repaired much more quickly and efficiently. And it gets even cooler because when scientists put the whale version of this protein into flies, those flies live longer. And then When they blasted those flies with X-ray radiation to damage their DNA, the flies carrying the whale protein repaired their DNA damage more effectively and survived longer. And here is the wildest part. Humans make this exact same protein, and now scientists are exploring whether we can safely boost it in ourselves, which means this whale superpower might not be so out of reach.
