Given what you’ve learned about the role of p53 in cancer and the impact of extra copies of the gene in animals like the elephant, do you think you would take the pill?

Read this article on p53, cancer, and elephants https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2015/10/how-elephants-crush-cancer (Links to an external site.)

Imagine biomedical scientists develop an over-the-counter pill that causes the p53 genes in your cells to duplicate so that instead of having two copies of the gene, you have four.

Given what you’ve learned about the role of p53 in cancer and the impact of extra copies of the gene in animals like the elephant, do you think you would take the pill? Why or why not?

NOTE: I would NOT take the pill, and it is for you to do further research on WHY I would not take it. For example, you could come across findings that state having extra p53 copies in our bodies is not proven to help prevent cancer in humans and may, in fact, cause a higher risk of cancer. Also, for example, just because the above article talks about how an elephant has a lower cancer rate than humans because of their higher number of p53 copies does not mean that giving humans more p53 copies will have the same effect.

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