Science & TechFact

Elephants carry 20 copies of a cancer-guard gene. You have one.

More cells, more divisions, more cancer, that is how it should go. Yet elephants with a hundred times your cell count do not get more cancer: Peto's paradox. In 2015 two teams found one explanation: African elephants carry 20 copies of the tumour suppressor gene TP53, Asian elephants 15 to 20. Humans and most mammals have a single copy.

Useful: Cancer risk doesn't simply scale with body size. Evolution builds in countermeasures.

Source: en.wikipedia.org

Biologie GenetikKrebs

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