Superlative: The very best to you

Matthew LaPlante’s Superlative is an homage to the Guinness Book of Records, natural edition. He admits everyone loves record setters, including if not especially him. And he is a lover of things natural. As a journalist, he says he pestered his editor until he was allowed to cover the zoo. The book is a best of, featuring what animals and plants do that Man can only drool over.

LaPlante has put a lot of passion into the book. He seems to have met pretty much every animal and plant he describes, from his visits with scientists and their labs, to field trips all over the planet. It is a labor of love as much as appreciation and awe. The most interesting aspects are the whys. Why is this the loudest, the biggest, the tallest, the smallest, the fastest runner/swimmer/flier? What is its advantage? Why does this being have this ability at all?

Elephants have the secret to cancer

Elephants rank very highly in his schema. Elephants and Man share a cancer-fighting gene called p53. In Man it surrounds the mutated and mutating cancer cells, and fails to stop them. In elephants, which have 20 copies of p53, it tells the cells to die. So elephants are not cancer-prone. This commanded cell death is called apoptosis, and we see it in Man when the brain tells mitochondria to die when the energy they produce is no longer needed by aging bodies. Not a…