You're listening to Bulletproof Radio with Dave Asprey.

Today's cool talk to the day is about elephants.

And that's because elephants almost never get cancer, which is kind of surprising given

that they grow really large and they live a long time, which ought to provide more opportunities

for the cells to turn into cancer cells.

And the reason for this is probably a newly described gene that was brought back from

the dead that they think is now protecting them from disease.

When scientists looked into the elephants of Lucienary History, they found a defunct

gene called LIF6 that somehow got turned back on 59 million years ago when elephants

started to get really big.

And it's found only in elephants and their relatives, it's triggered by another gene called

TP53, which puts cells out of commission at the first sign of damage before they turn

cancerous.

And the TP53 gene makes a protein that protects cellular DNA damage and signals for the cell

to basically fix itself or die, which is what we want our own cells to do.

Elephants have 20 copies of the TP53 gene compared to just one in humans and other mammals

like us.

And studies were they looked at autopsy data from the San Diego Zoo in a database of

650 elephant deaths found that just about 4.8% of them get cancer.

And for humans, it can go as high as 25%.

What that means is that not only do I want to be part elephant, because of the cancer

thing, but elephants have a good memory and they live a long time.

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