This is TED Health, a podcast from TED, and I'm your host, Dr. Shoshana Ungerleiter.

When it comes to the biggest medical questions we're still trying to answer, like why we age,

why cancer develops, and how some bodies seem to resist it better than others.

Humans are actually just one data point. Think about it. Evolution has

been running experiments for billions of years, across millions of species. So it just makes sense that

some of the most illuminating lessons about health and longevity can come from paying attention

to the natural world around us, noticing who's thriving, and then asking

how. We can learn so much from other species, and that idea is what led me to this week's

what caught my attention segment. My initial curiosity came from an unlikely place.

The genome of a whale, and not just any whale, but the bowhead whale. An animal that

can live more than 200 years grows to be larger than the size of a city bus, and somehow

manages to do all of that without being overwhelmed by cancer. From a biological perspective, that combination of size and lifespan should be a disaster.

More years alive usually means more time for DNA damage to accumulate.

More cells means more opportunities for mutations to go wrong.

And yet, bowhead whales seem to defy that math.

A new paper in nature digs into how they pull this off,

and the new research stopped me in my tracks.

So for a long time, scientists thought that animals that grow very large and live very long must protect

themselves by being especially ruthless at the cellular level. So their bodies might quickly

eliminate damaged cells before they can cause trouble. That's actually part of how elephants

stay healthy, for example. But biology rarely works in clean either-or categories. And it turns out,

most species use a mix of strategies, balancing when to remove damage cells and when to actually

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