{"id":25899,"date":"2026-01-21T18:30:00","date_gmt":"2026-01-21T23:30:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.ecoticias.com\/en\/?p=25899"},"modified":"2026-01-23T07:58:36","modified_gmt":"2026-01-23T12:58:36","slug":"the-whale-which-can-live-for-over-200-years-hides-a-cellular-trick-that-humans-also-have-but-almost-no-one-uses-it-in-this-way","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ecoticias.com\/en\/the-whale-which-can-live-for-over-200-years-hides-a-cellular-trick-that-humans-also-have-but-almost-no-one-uses-it-in-this-way\/25899\/","title":{"rendered":"The whale, which can live for over 200 years, hides a cellular trick that humans also have, but almost no one uses it in this way"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Imagine blowing out birthday candles at 120 and still feeling strong enough to chase grandkids around the yard. That kind of long life sounds like science fiction, yet some animals already come surprisingly close. A new study of the bowhead whale<\/a>, an Arctic giant that can live for more than 200 years, suggests its unusual DNA repair system could one day help push human aging further back.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Scientists from the University of Rochester<\/a> and partner institutions found that bowhead whales pack their cells with a protein called CIRBP<\/a> that helps repair dangerous DNA damage with striking efficiency. When the team boosted this same protein in human cells and in fruit flies, the cells fixed breaks more accurately and the flies lived longer.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Researchers stress that people are nowhere near 200 year lifespans, but they say the work shows biology leaves more room for healthy longevity than we once thought.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A whale that stays healthy for two human lifetimes<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Bowhead whales live in icy Arctic waters and still manage to thrive for more than two centuries. For most of that time they show few signs of age-related disease such as cancer<\/a>. On paper their huge bodies should be perfect breeding grounds for tumors, yet in real life they mostly stay healthy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That mystery sits at the heart of what biologists call Peto’s paradox<\/a>, the observation that big, long lived animals do not get cancer nearly as often as math would predict. More cells and more cell divisions should mean more errors in DNA and more chances for a rogue cell to turn into a tumor. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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