Too Bad I'm Not an Elephant

It would seem elephants are notably cancer resistant. Given their size and longevity, they should be dropping dead from cancer at rates far higher than they actually do. While as many as 25% of humans can expect to die of cancer, it seems just 5% of elephants will do so.

Naturally, scientists are curious about this and a few just published an article the Journal of the American Medical Association explaining why. It seems thirty-eight of the genes of an elephant, as opposed to just two for humans, can manufacture a protein called p38 that works to repress tumor formation. In short, and probably completely wrong non-scientific terms, when the cell starts to mutate the protein forces it to commit suicide so that the mutation doesn't replicate. 

Lucky for the elephants, though in fairness elephants don't really seem all that lucky in any other way so maybe they deserve to be somewhat cancerproof. Actually, what they really need is to be bulletproof. 

Of course, given how things tend to work, right about when scientists figure out how to use elephant DNA to create a cancer vaccine will be just about the time we manage to hunt the things to extinction.