Peto’s Paradox – Biological Enigma Offers New Insights into the Mystery of Cancer

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

[...] The cells in the body can be thought of as tiny archery targets, each vulnerable to the deadly arrow of cancer. The more cells a given animal has and the longer it lives, the greater its odds of accumulating harmful cell mutations that can eventually lead to cancer. Or at least, this is what intuition suggests.

Nevertheless, many very large animals bearing huge cell populations, including elephants and whales, not only survive to old age, but have remarkably low rates of cancer. This biological enigma bears the name Peto's paradox. In short, the paradox says that species size and longevity should be proportional to cancer incidence, yet the real-world data across species suggest this association does not hold.

In a new study appearing in the journal Nature, Carlo Maley, a researcher with the Biodesign Center for Biocomputing, Security and Society at Arizona State University, along with international colleagues, explore recent implications of Peto's paradox and highlight what science is learning about cancer across the tree of life.

The researchers analyze the largest cross-species database of its kind-a pool of adult mammalian life from zoo records that includes 110,148 individuals spanning 191 species.

Read more of this story at SoylentNews.