It Might Get Messy

It Might Get Messy

Consider the naked mole rat, Heterocephalus glaber. You may not want to consider them too close to bed time, BTW. Unless you’re a pretty hardcore biologist they are, in a number of ways, kind of creepy. But in the coolest possible way. 

Naked mole rats live in dry sandy environments in east Africa, in colonies of up to several hundred individuals. They are odd looking—hairless tubes with big teeth, kind of like wrinkly bratwursts with fangs. Here’s one slurped off the web:

They are, as you might expect, burrowers. They share an odd assortment of evolutionary skills or abilities or outcomes. First, they are eusocial mammals, which means they live in colonies dominated by single queens who do most of the reproducing. Naked mole rats live for decades—incredibly long life span for a sub-mouse sized species. They have little or no sense of pain in their epidermis. You can fry ‘em or dip ‘em in acid, and they just laugh in your face. They use tools—they place carefully shaped wedges of wood or dried  plant stems behind their teeth so that they reduce the quantity of dry, physiologically problematic particulate matter run down their gullet. When one wedge wears out, they replace it as neede. Pretty slick, huh?

But it’s nothing compared to this—naked mole rates are not known ot get cancers of any sort. They share one generic anti-cancer gene with human beings—genetically coding for a tumor suppressing protein called  p27. But they also code for second powerful tumor-suppressive protein called p16. Between the two of them, they pretty much keep naked mole rats footloose…well, as footloose as a small, short-limbed burrowing rodent can ge…and cancer-free.

I am, as of last week’s biopsy of the suspiciously tumor-like growth in my throat, once again technically cancer-free. I think it’ll be touch and go with this for me. The appearance of blobby tumor-looking but not-malignant tissue is not a good thing. But maybe by the next time I have to go around for treatment…or certainly by the time our kids have to around for treatment—naked mole rat genetic engineering will advance our treatment technologies beyond the blunt-trauma hammers of radiation and chemotherapy. Weird-ass as they are they, that may be a very, very good thing.

Hang in there, my friends. And do a little research on naked mole rats. They’ll very cool in so many ways. Especially non-cancer ways!

Useful Reference 

http://io9.com/5889665/10-reasons-naked-mole-rats-will-inherit-the-earth