Hacker News Reader

Comment by hydrogen18 | Hacker News Reader

If this increased cancer rates, whales should be completely consumed by cancer at a young age.

However, there are few cases of whales being found to die of cancer.

Humans have a "tumour suppressor gene" called p53 which helps reduce the occurrence of cancers. Elephants (not quite whale size, but still pretty big!) have been shown to simultaneously express 20 variants of p53 which is thought to (at least partially) account for the lack of an expected increase in incidences of tumours given their sheer number of cells.

Further reading: http://www.nature.com/news/how-elephants-avoid-cancer-1.1853...

One of the theories is that for whales, they are so large their cancer gets cancer and dies before the cancer is large enough to effect them. Or genes prevent them from getting it, etc.

There are a number of ways that whales are different from humans, and there is no reason that the cancer scaling with mass in humans is invalidated by whales.

Human men are pretty similar to human women, whales are kind of different. So the number of cells alone is quite a good way to differentiate men and women, not so much humans and whales.

Then it's not about gender, other than the gender being a proxy for a skewing of the "weight" of the individuals involved.

But, if the GP's hypothesis were to be empirically tested, I guess they could correct for the weight or volume of the individuals being sampled.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com