The Mere Existence of Whales

Strictly speaking, there should be no blue whales. Blue whales can weigh over a thousand times more than a human being. That's a lot of extra cells, and as those cells grow and divide, there's a small chance that each one will mutate. A mutation can be harmless, or it can be the first step towards cancer. As the descendants of a precancerous cell continue to divide, they run a risk of taking a further step towards a full-blown tumor. To some extent, cancer is a lottery, and a 100-foot blue whale has a lot more tickets than we do. Aleah Caulin of the University of Pennsylvania and Carlo Maley of the University of California, San Francisco, have done some calculations of the risk of cancer for blue whales thanks to their huge size. We don't know a lot about cancer in blue whales, because blue whale oncology wards would ...