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This is Science Friday.

I'm Flor Lichten.

Today in the podcast, looking for clues to fighting cancer in creatures big and small.

Chickens, for example, have high rates of cancer.

On the other side of the coin, we know that dolphins, for example, have very low rates of cancer.

If you throw a huge party, there's more of a chance of something going haywire than if you host a quiet little

get together with a couple of friends. And it makes sense, right? More people, more chance for chaos.

So it also kind of makes sense that in an organism, a bigger species with more cells might have

more of a chance of something going wrong with one of those cells, like a mutation

leading to cancer. Back in 1977, a British epidemiologist named Richard Pito observed that

that didn't seem to be true. Bigger animals didn't seem to have a greater risk of cancer than

smaller ones. This became known as Pito's Paradox,

and also the source of phrases like, elephants don't get cancer, which side note, elephants do,

in fact, get cancer. Anyway, research published this week in the proceedings of the National Academy of

Sciences takes a new look at Pito's Paradox using an unusual set of data, death reports from zoos around the world.

Joining me now to explain is Dr. Sarah Amund.

She's an associate professor of urology and oncology at Johns Hopkins University Medical School and one of the authors of that paper.

Sarah, welcome to Science Friday.

Thanks so much for having me.

Okay, is Pito's Paradox like a hot topic in cancer circles? The cancer research community is a really big place. But there's certainly

a growing interest in this idea of comparative oncology. So what can we learn about cancer rates

...