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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