A cool discovery about long-lived bowhead whales

I think we all can agree that whales are cool. I happen to think that every living species has some element of cool about it, but the coolness of whales is pretty self-evident.

Even given that general coolness, though, some whales are cooler than others. Near the top of that pantheon is the bowhead whale.

For starters, bowheads are the second-heaviest mammal on the planet, typically weighing around 100 tons, give or take. That's roughly the size of eight fully grown African elephants. Their heads are nearly 40% of their body length.

But the coolest thing about bowhead whales is their astonishing age. They are believed to be the longest-lived of all mammals, with estimates reaching up to 268 years. That's not just theory. Some Alaskan Inuits have been hunting bowheads — the only whale species that spends its entire life in the frigid waters of the Arctic Ocean — for centuries. And some of those hunters discovered in the blubber of some whales caught in the late 1900s harpoon heads that dated back to the mid-1800s.

Juxtapose their weight and age and now you have the reason all of us should be intensely curious about bowhead whales: Deciphering the reason for their longevity could be a boon for us.

Bowhead whales are an example of something called Peto's paradox — when larger beings do not have a proportionally higher risk of cancer than smaller beings. The paradox is counterintuitive. Cells of larger beings must multiply many more times than cells of smaller beings to achieve their larger mass, and that should increase the risk of mutations that lead to cancer. Whales have around 1,000 times the number of cells of humans, but humans have a much higher risk of cancer.

Now researchers think they know why: Bowhead whales are very good at repairing damaged DNA, which leads to many ailments including cancer.

Vera Gorbunova and Andrei Seluanov, a husband-and-wife team at the University of Rochester who study long-lived mammals and the reasons for their longevity, discovered that bowhead whales produce copious amounts of CIRBP, a protein that accelerates the production of other proteins whose job is to protect the whales from cell damage triggered by their cold environment.

Inserting bowhead CIRBP into human cells doubled the rate of DNA repair in those cells. Fruit flies that received the CIRBP gene lived longer than those that did not. The research was published this past week in the journal Nature.

The implications are profound and exciting: Tweaking proteins in humans could extend our life span.

The research was complex. Gorbunova and Seluanov needed live bowhead cells to run their experiments. That meant sending students to Inuit communities in Alaska to ask hunters for samples from the bowheads they caught. The samples had to be put on ice and hurried back to Rochester so the researchers could grow populations of bowhead cells for batteries of tests.

Their intriguing findings come as the federal government has pulled back from funding scientific research, and as medical schools in New York are urging the state to set up a state-run research institute to provide reliable funding to help continue to recruit and train the researchers who will make the medical discoveries of the future — like the applicability of bowhead whale proteins to humans.

The University of Rochester project was funded from a variety of sources — not only earlier grants from the federal National Institutes of Health and Department of Defense but also the French National Research Agency, Wellcome Trust and The Royal Society, the Cancer Prevention & Research Institute of Texas, and the Milky Way Research Foundation.

That is another form of coolness.

We should all give thanks for the coolness of bowhead whales, the scientists who study them, and the people and institutions that believe such work is worth supporting.

Columnist Michael Dobie's opinions are his own.

By Michael Dobie

michael.dobie1@newsday.commwdobie

Michael Dobie is a retired member of the Newsday editorial board.