Cancer is a ubiquitous disease of metazoans, predicted to disproportionately affect larger,
long-lived organisms owing to their greater number of cell divisions, and thus increased …

Background Cancer is a common diagnosis in many mammalian species, yet they vary in
their vulnerability to cancer. The factors driving this variation are unknown, but life history …

The risk of developing cancer should theoretically increase with both the number of cells
and the lifespan of an organism. However, gigantic animals do not get more cancer than …

Whales have 1000-fold more cells than humans and mice have 1000-fold fewer; however,
cancer risk across species does not increase with the number of somatic cells and the …

Cancer is a disease of multicellular animals caused by unregulated cell division. The
prevailing model of cancer (multistage carcinogenesis) is based on the view that cancer …

Our understanding of cancer has greatly advanced since Nordling [Nordling CO (1953) Br J
Cancer 7 (1): 68–72] and Armitage and Doll [Armitage P, Doll R (1954) Br J Cancer 8 (1): 1 …

The naked mole rat (Heterocephalus glaber) is a strictly subterranean, extraordinarily long-
lived eusocial mammal. Although it is the size of a mouse, its maximum lifespan exceeds 30 …

Large-bodied organisms have more cells that can potentially turn cancerous than small-
bodied organisms, imposing an increased risk of developing cancer. This expectation …

The evolution of multicellularity required the suppression of cancer. If every cell has some
chance of becoming cancerous, large, long-lived organisms should have an increased risk …

Larger organisms have more potentially carcinogenic cells, tend to live longer and require
more ontogenic cell divisions. Therefore, intuitively one might expect cancer incidence to …