The wolves living near the destroyed Chernobyl nuclear power plant have somehow managed to thrive for years amid the high levels of radiation there.
So much so that PBS recently ran a documentary about the canines titled, simply, "Radioactive Wolves."
(You gotta love picturing these scientists sitting around to come up with the term "radioactive wolves.")
You won't be surprised to learn that hanging around an exploded nuclear reactor for years and years will have some effects on a body. And one of them is that it makes wolves apparently, um, resistant to cancer?
Mutant wolves who roam the human-free Chernobyl Exclusion Zone have developed cancer-resilient genomes that could be key to helping humans fight the deadly disease, according to a study.
Now, I don't know about you, but if someone tells me, "Hey, I just found out that the wolves around the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant have cancer-resilient genomes!" my response is going to be:
I mean it's not like you just waltz into the Zone of Avoidance and ask these wolves about their genomes, right?
So here's how it was done:
In 2014, [Princeton scientist Cara] Love and her colleagues went inside the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone and put GPS collars equipped with radiation dosimeters on the wild wolves. They also took blood from the animals to understand their responses to the cancer-causing radiation, according to a release published by the Society of Integrative and Comparative Biology.
The researchers found that the wolves are "exposed to 11.28 millirem of radiation daily for their lifespans." That is, to put it mildly, a lot.
The wolves' immune systems "appeared different than normal wolves," the scientists determined. (Understatement of the century, I'm sure.) Cara Love "pinpointed specific regions of the wolf genome that seem to be resilient to increased cancer risk."
So how do we reap the rewards of this cancer resilience? Do we have to go walk around Chernobyl every day for years? Because I saw the TV show and I know how that ends.
No, as is usually the case with real science, the answer is much more simple and unexciting:
The research could be key to examining how gene mutations in humans could increase the odds of surviving cancer — flipping the script on many known gene mutations, like BRCA, that cause cancer.
We probably won't know how these genes might work to our advantage for many years, if ever.
Still, it's pretty cool science — and man, those wolves are hardcore. Keep it up, mutant wolves!
Here's a short, timestamped documentary looking at some of the wolves that live in the radioactive disaster zone:
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