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Aren't there already large long-living animals like elephants that basically don't get cancer?


Their average life expectancy is around 70 years, and yes, cancer is rarer in elephants, potentially due to the species having extra copies of the TP53 gene.

Cancer is also a result of many other factors of which humans are more exposed to than elephants typically are, environmental and pollution being a major one, and food ingredients being another. A life expectancy of 70 years for a human isn't that great; in 2024 in Europe it was 79 years for males and 84 years for women, and that's with all the contributing cancer risk factors in society as mentioned earlier.

A more interesting species might be immortal jellyfish, but the simplicity of the organism might be a contributing factor in why it works the way it does.




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