The 200-Year Old Whale

another round of Gene Shorts, your Dumbo octopus-sized science fix, while we catch our breath between seasons. And if you don’t know what a Dumbo octopus is, go look it up right now. So tiny, so cute. And today, as per usual, we’ve got none other than Genome BC’s Sarah Lando here to drop some science on us. Hey, Sarah.

00:00:25

Sarah Lando: Hey, Kaylee. Great to see you, and grateful we’re staying on this planet for this one.

00:00:30

Announcer: Previously on Nice Genes.

00:00:33

Sarah Lando: How do I go back to Earth right now? Where’s the door? Oh my god, don’t touch that.

00:00:38

Computer: Airlock secured.

00:00:44

Dr. Kaylee Byers: Yeah. I mean, it’s good to be on the ground, and I’m pretty excited to hear what you’ve got for us today.

00:00:49

Sarah Lando: Well, Kaylee, this story has been making a real splash in the genomics world, and instead of just telling you what it’s about, I thought we’d warm up with a little game of Name That Sound.

00:00:59

Announcer: Name That Sound.

00:01:02

Dr. Kaylee Byers: It sounds chaotic and I love it.

00:01:04

Sarah Lando: Okay. Get ready, get in your zen, and let’s do it in three, two, one.

00:01:20

Dr. Kaylee Byers: Wow. It’s like something out of my nightmare. This is the same animal? I would guess dinosaur eating an accordion. Correct? Way off?

00:01:31

Sarah Lando: That’s what it sounds like. So that was actually the sound of a bowhead whale, which is our main character for this story. These whales live primarily in the waters around the North Pole, so very cold. To survive in these frigid waters, bowhead whales have an outer layer of blubber that is roughly half a meter thick, and they can weigh around 90 tons, which is about 200, 000 pounds. Think of that as 22 elephants. They get their name bowhead from their large curved heads, which they actually use to break through Arctic ice in search for food. And another really cool thing about them is that they can live for up to 200 years.

00:02:14

Dr. Kaylee Byers: I mean, I respect it, but 200’s too long. I’m just thinking about how tired I am at almost 40, I can’t project to 200. But I do think I would also retreat to the Arctic waters, so that tracks.

00:02:27

Sarah Lando: So when scientists look at really big animals like bowheads, they sometimes talk about something called Peto’s paradox. Have you heard of that one?

00:02:36

Dr. Kaylee Byers: I am more familiar with Pedro Pascal paradox. But the Peto’s paradox, I think, is where you have a really large animal, which means they’ve got more cells, they’ve got lots of DNA, and that gives more opportunity for these mutations that can result in cancerous cells. But in reality, with these large animals, we don’t necessarily see that.

00:02:58

Sarah Lando: Exactly. And we see this paradox in action when we compare elephants to humans, for example. Humans are smaller with fewer cells, yet elephants get cancer far less than we do.

00:03:10

Dr. Kaylee Byers: Yeah, that’s surprising. So we would expect them to just be walking balls of cancer that never forget, but they’re not.

00:03:16

Sarah Lando: Yeah. So imagine a 200, 000 pound whale living for nearly 200 years. That’s like quadrillions of cells copying and dividing over centuries, presenting a lot of opportunities for mutations. But these whales rarely get cancer. So scientists have been looking into this, and recently uncovered a secret weapon behind this longevity.

00:03:37

Dr. Kaylee Byers: Not going to lie to you, don’t love the idea of whales up in the Arctic with weapons, but I am curious as to what this one is. So what have they got?

00:03:46

Sarah Lando: So in a paper published in Nature in October 2025, just a few months ago, a group of researchers out of the US shared their findings and how they went about doing this work. The researchers partnered with the Inupiaq Inuit communities in Northern Alaska and got tissue samples from their annual hunts. They then brought the samples back, grew the whale cells in a lab, and compared them with human cells. They initially hypothesized that the whale cells would be more resistant to becoming cancerous, you know, going back to the whole Peto’s paradox thing. But what they actually found was the complete opposite, the whale cells became cancerous more easily than the human cells did. So what’s going on here?

00:04:29

Dr. Kaylee Byers: I don’t know. What is going on?

00:04:30

Sarah Lando: It turns out that it’s not actually their cells that are super tough against cancer as they initially thought. What’s actually happening is that they’re amazing at repairing their DNA, which keeps mutation rates really low. In humans, as we get older, our DNA accumulates damage, and then our cells try to fix this, but often do so kind of sloppily, like patching a hole in a wall with tape. It holds for a while, but cracks are still there. Whereas in bowhead whales, they fix their DNA really cleanly, more like replacing the damaged section of a wall with a perfectly smooth patch. The magic behind this that they uncovered is a protein called CIRBP, short for cold-inducible RNA-binding protein, which kicks into action in icy waters where these whales live.

00:05:21

Dr. Kaylee Byers: Okay. So they do get this damage, but they actually have a repair mechanism that sounds like gets activated in those chilly waters.

00:05:30

Sarah Lando: Exactly. And the really cool part is that when researchers put the whale CIRBP into human cells, those cells had fewer mutations, so they got better at repairing damaged DNA. So not only is this a cool whale fact, but it’s a potential breakthrough for cancer research, which is pretty amazing. So understanding CIRBP and DNA repair could inform future cancer prevention strategies or anti- aging treatments in humans.

00:05:59

Dr. Kaylee Byers: I love the potential for cancer treatment, but capitalism tells me this is going to be really big in the aesthetics space. And I kind of love the idea of people, instead of having the salmon sperm put into their facial, that they’re getting blubber all over their faces and then having to activate it in a cold plunge. I really see a future here. Maybe we should invest.

00:06:20

Sarah Lando: We should.

00:06:21

Dr. Kaylee Byers: Let’s do it. Well, Sarah, thank you for coming on with this incredible story, for giving us a very fun new spa idea, and I can’t wait to see what else you’ve got in store for us this season.

00:06:31

Sarah Lando: Your most whale-come. Oh, and yeah, the next one’s going to be good, I promise drama.

00:06:37

Dr. Kaylee Byers: Oh my gosh. Bring the tea. We will spill it.

00:06:39

Sarah Lando: Let’s do it.

00:06:40

Dr. Kaylee Byers: Well, thank you all for swimming along with us for this Gene Short. Don’t forget to keep checking your feed for more minisodes like this one. Plus, some of our favorite Nice Genes reruns, we like to call Genomic Repeats, to tide you over. I’m Dr. Kaylee Byers. Thanks for listening. So long and fair-whale. Woo. Whaled it.

00:06:59

Sarah Lando: Whaled it.

00:07:00

Dr. Kaylee Byers: That’s the closing.