I love living in the future.

[theweaselking]

11,000 year old dog found. Alive. Currently living.

More specifically, it lives in the same sense that HeLa is still Henrietta Lacks: Canine Transmissible Venereal Tumour is an STD of dogs. It is cancer. It is a dog from eleven thousand years ago that achieved a kind of mutant immortality. It is worldwide.

Comments

[franklanguage.livejournal.com]

Yeah, when I read "venereal," I was like, "Dogs can get STDs?" I'd better be careful whose leg I let Corky hump!

[drhoz.livejournal.com]

Tasmanian Devil Facial Tumour is another transmissible cancer

[fridgepunk.livejournal.com]

It is literally a cancer that is mainly transmitted by dogs sniffing another dog with butt cancer, getting face cancer from that, then sniffing another dog's butt thereby giving them butt cancer and the cycle restarts.

Sometime it is also transmitted through sex as well but I have long held that an opportunity to name it "canine retro-cranial transmissable tumor" was missed.

[frith]

But this one is better! The Tasmanian Devils are so inbred that, like cheetahs, they don't reject tissue from other devils. This dog tumor has somehow managed to evade immune system detection for over 10,000 years! Or is indiscriminate grafting of tissue without rejection commonplace in dogs?

[frith]

I'd like to see the nucleus of one of these tumor cells transplanted wholesale into an enucleated dog egg and brought to term. Would it live?

[glenn-3.livejournal.com]

I would think not, considering they judged the age of it by counting the huge number of mutations. Something like 2 million? There are probably hundreds, if not thousands, of those mutations that would make such an experiment non-viable. More's the pity.

[frith]

I agree, it has not lived in an environment that would act on its viability as a whole organism, only in an environment that would act on its viability as a tissue.