[HN Gopher] How elephants avoid cancer (2015)
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How elephants avoid cancer (2015)
Author : signa11
Score : 117 points
Date : 2021-08-17 10:08 UTC (12 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.nature.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.nature.com)
| ginko wrote:
| Who added the question mark to the title and why? At least make
| it "How do Elephants Avoid Cancer?" so it's a grammatically
| correct sentence.
| OJFord wrote:
| I'm more irked, as usual, by HN's Automatic Click-Bait Case-
| ifying.
|
| You can, and I do when submitting, remove it by editing the
| title, but of course most people don't and why should they.
| Seems to go against the guideline to, generally speaking, leave
| the title as it is in the original article, too.
| codetrotter wrote:
| > Automatic Click-Bait Case-ifying
|
| You mean title case?
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Title_case
|
| > Title case or headline case is a style of capitalization
| used for rendering the titles of published works or works of
| art in English.
|
| It's got nothing to do with click-bait. It's part of English
| grammar.
| [deleted]
| hdjjhhvvhga wrote:
| Capitalization is part of orthography, not grammar.
| stronglikedan wrote:
| Pedantically, yes. Ubiquitously, no.
| OJFord wrote:
| On the contrary it has nothing to do with grammar, and I
| relate it to click-bait because it's so frequently done by
| such articles by BuzzFeed and the like; with much more
| prevalence than among things I actually want to read.
|
| It is typically a signal that I _don 't_ want to read
| something, which makes it especially confusing on HN, which
| is generally a list of things I _do_ want to read.
| messe wrote:
| It's nothing to do with grammar, it's a purely stylistic
| choice.
| OJFord wrote:
| Exactly, a stylistic choice frequently made by click-bait
| type sites like Buzzfeed, and _not_ made by Nature in the
| submission.
| djhn wrote:
| Oh but what is grammar if not a bunch of stylistic
| choices that over time have settled?
|
| I hate title case, but unfortunately it seems to have
| become The Way We Write Titles.
| playpause wrote:
| That might just be an American perspective. It is not
| standard elsewhere. I just checked all the UK and
| Canadian newspaper sites I can think of, and not one of
| them uses Stupid Title Case.
| hdjjhhvvhga wrote:
| There are two things here. Title capitalization is
| definitely a part of English orthography. Any book you
| take, no matter what English-speaking country the author
| is from, will always use title case, unless it wants to
| make a point (avant-garde etc.).
|
| However, there are differences as to what deserves to be
| capitalized. Just the titles of books, films, etc? What
| about the titles of articles, are they in any way
| different, or maybe worse than the titles of books etc.?
| I guess this need for consistency pervades the American
| usage, codified in the CMoS and other style guides, and
| hence applied universally.
| dang wrote:
| One past thread:
|
| _How Elephants Avoid Cancer (2015)_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14698886 - July 2017 (50
| comments)
| dsign wrote:
| If this "brute approach"[1] of having multiple copies of a gene
| manages to prevent cancer, imagine what some (human) intelligent
| design can achieve.
|
| [1] Gene duplication is common in nature, and it's one of the
| main mechanisms by which new genes with different functions
| evolve.
| idnefju wrote:
| Genetic engineering will be our only hope precisely because
| modern medicine is disregarding our evolution. Lots of bad
| mutations are being passed down because we can treat them,
| which of course allows people to live a good life.
| _jal wrote:
| > imagine what some (human) intelligent design can achieve
|
| We don't have to imagine. Everyone here is familiar with
| Clippy.
|
| More seriously, I think this is a category error, rather than
| just hubris. I don't think human intelligence is a substitute
| for evolutionary grinding.
| dsign wrote:
| > We don't have to imagine. Everyone here is familiar with
| Clippy.
|
| I loved Clippy
| lebuffon wrote:
| Doctor: I've got good news and bad news. The good news is we
| have genetically modified you so that you will never get
| cancer.
|
| Patient: What's the bad news?
|
| Doctor: In about 8 months you'll be able to unzip your pants
| with your nose.
|
| :-)
| dsign wrote:
| > In about 8 months you'll be able to unzip your pants with
| your nose.
|
| That's not the end of the world :)
| inciampati wrote:
| I'm imagining that our intelligence will lead us to an elegant
| solution that initially appears to work but later proves to
| have catastrophic unintended side effects. Maybe just copying
| genes is enough? That brute force approach might be smarter
| than it appears, given how incredibly common it is in nature. A
| key thing is that the copies can repair themselves off each
| other. The more copies that are available, the more robust the
| system is to error. That's part of why humans have their
| ribosomal DNA in super high copy number in five psuedo-
| homologous regions on the short arms of our acrocentric
| chromosomes. The genome keeps lots of copies of the most
| important stuff. For humans, cancer wasn't so important, until
| recently. So we might need to accelerate things and increase
| our tumor suppressor copy number. It works for people with
| trisomy-21.
| pharaohgeek wrote:
| In humans, a defect in the TP53 gene that leads to genetic
| predisposition to cancer is called Li-Fraumeni Syndrome. It
| explains a lot of people who have a strong family history of
| cancer or those who get it early in childhood.
| 123jay7 wrote:
| because they are happy all the time.
| delibes wrote:
| Also needs 2015, and has been posted before
| https://hn.algolia.com/?q=elephants+cancer
| dajohnson89 wrote:
| Is there a big list of things a human can do, to reduce/minimize
| their risk of getting cancer? "dont smoke" is obvious but a lot
| of chemicals/behaviors are less well understood in terms of
| cancer risk.
| vharuck wrote:
| https://www.cancer.org/healthy.html
|
| - No smoking, or chewing tobacco
|
| - Don't drink excessively
|
| - Stay at a good weight
|
| - Use sunblock
|
| - Eat healthy (notably, reduce consumption of red meats)
|
| - Get your recommended cancer screenings (mammograms,
| colonoscopies, prostate exams, etc)
|
| Other tips for specific populations:
|
| - If you are or were a heavy smoker, talk with your doctor
| about a lung cancer screening
|
| - Vaccinate children against HPV
|
| - Some experts recommend Hepatitis C screening for Baby Boomers
| lordnacho wrote:
| I wondered about this the other day and didn't get much of an
| answer:
|
| Are there first-hand research studies where we take a large
| sample of some animal (whales / mole rats / whatever) and check
| the animals for cancer?
|
| Apart from the thought experiment of Peto's paradox, has someone
| actually taken the time and effort to document this? I'd be
| interested in reading some papers.
| cosbgn wrote:
| One theory is that they actually get so many cancers that they
| fight each other and never reach the stage where they would
| become harmful for the Elephant. A good video about this was made
| by Kurzgesagt - https://youtube.com/watch?v=1AElONvi9WQ
| jjk166 wrote:
| Hypertumors aren't really a good explanation for Peto's
| Paradox. Yes, larger animals would need larger tumors to kill
| them, and larger tumors are more likely to develop hypertumors,
| but even if cancer didn't kill a large animal we'd still expect
| to see all those "small" tumors that haven't yet developed
| hypertumors.
|
| Further, Peto's paradox doesn't just apply to large organisms:
| small creatures get higher cancer rates. You'd expect there to
| be some threshold below which the odds of a hypertumor
| developing are incredibly low, and all organisms that can be
| killed by tumors smaller than this threshold would have a
| cancer incidence rate proportional to body mass. At the same
| time there should be some threshold where a hypertumor is
| basically guaranteed, above which cancer deaths would simply
| stop regardless of body mass. Instead, cancer rate is
| independent of body mass across the spectrum.
|
| Then, the lack of correlation between cancer rates and body
| mass only applies between species. Within a single species,
| animals with more body mass do have higher rates of cancer and
| vice versa. This is directly contradictory to what we'd expect
| if cancer suppression was a result of increased body mass.
|
| Finally, closely related to Peto's Paradox is the fact that
| longer lived species have lower per-cell division cancer rates
| than shorter lived species. Animals with different lifespans
| but of the same bodymass can be killed by tumors of the same
| size, so you need some explanation other than hypertumors
| (which occur as a function of the size of the tumor) to explain
| this observation.
|
| Evolutionary adaptations that limit cancer are both a simpler
| and better explanation for these observations. Every animal is
| going to have some threshold in its life by which it is likely
| to have passed on its genes, and another threshold beyond which
| it is unlikely to better pass down its genes. Any gene that
| kills you before the first threshold is going to be strongly
| selected against, any gene that keeps you alive after the
| second threshold isn't going to have much selective pressure
| supporting it. A mouse in the wild can successfully pass on its
| genes in 3 months and is unlikely to live past 18 months due to
| injury and predation. While mice under ideal conditions in
| captivity have lived for up to 6 years, a gene that helps mice
| suppress cancer when they're 5 years old isn't doing wild mice
| any favors. On the other end of the spectrum, blue whales take
| a minimum of 16 years to reach genetic breakeven, and
| realistically given their distribution it could easily take
| much longer. A mutation that causes a 5 year old whale to get
| fatal cancer will never get passed on to offspring. We should
| logically expect that any species will continue to evolve
| cancer defense mechanisms up until the point at which cancer is
| no longer the limiting factor for passing on their genes, at
| which point evolution stops selecting for further improvements.
| bradrn wrote:
| Also discussed by Scott Alexander in some detail, near the end
| of a mostly unrelated post:
| https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/06/14/living-by-the-sword/
| MiddleEndian wrote:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aI0euMFAWF8
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