🔗 Peto's Paradox

🔗 Physiology 🔗 Molecular Biology 🔗 Physiology/cell 🔗 Molecular Biology/Molecular and Cell Biology

Peto's paradox is an observation that at the species level, the incidence of cancer does not appear to correlate with the number of cells in an organism. For example, the incidence of cancer in humans is much higher than the incidence of cancer in whales, despite whales having more cells than humans. If the probability of carcinogenesis were constant across cells, one would expect whales to have a higher incidence of cancer than humans. Peto's paradox is named after English statistician and epidemiologist Richard Peto, who first observed the connection.