Why Elephants Don’t Explode: How Nature Solves Bigness

Re:Why Elephants Don’t Explode: How Nature Solves Bigness by ak217 on Tuesday August 08, 2017 @11:40AM (#14958965)

I thought this would be about allometric scaling of organs. But if we're on the topic of metabolism, I wonder what the rate of cancer is for shrews vs. elephants, once the metabolism and lifespan are somehow accounted for.

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Re:Why Elephants Don’t Explode: How Nature Solves Bigness by evolve2017 on Tuesday August 08, 2017 @05:16PM (#14962785)

This is actually a great question - take a look at this discussion from 2015.

This isn't my area of expertise, but my understanding is that elephants have many more copies of TP53, a gene that plays a critical role in regulating the cell cycle (and thus uncontrolled growth that may occur in cancer).

One of the linked papers also states that there was no correlation between body size and cancer in their experiments.

https://www.nature.com/news/how-elephants-avoid-cancer-1.185...

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Re:Why Elephants Don’t Explode: How Nature Solves Bigness by Retric on Tuesday August 08, 2017 @01:33PM (#14960238)

Cancer is vastly more common among specific tissue types. So, it's hard to do a direct comparison.

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Re:Why Elephants Don’t Explode: How Nature Solves Bigness by tbirrell on Tuesday August 08, 2017 @12:17PM (#14959361)

What does metabolism have to do with cancer?

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Re:Why Elephants Don’t Explode: How Nature Solves Bigness by 24gttghh on Tuesday August 08, 2017 @12:40PM (#14959618)

Quite possibly, a lot:

https://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/15/magazine/warburg-effect-a...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warburg_effect

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