There is a lot not to envy about the life of the naked mole rat: imagine passing your days in a stuffy, pitch-black system of tunnels two or three metres underground with 100 of your closest relatives. But there is one thing that humans might covet: as far as anyone knows, the animal never gets cancer. Native to the Horn of Africa, this small rodent (Heterocephalus glaber) is neither a mole nor a rat; it is actually more closely related to porcupines and guinea pigs. The animal's pale-pink, wrinkled skin is nearly hairless, the better to slip through those narrow burrows. But there is yet another more compelling fact: in all the thousands of naked mole rats that have lived and died in research labs and zoos over the past several decades, not a single instance of spontaneous cancer has been recorded.
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