Athena Aktipis

speaker

1,334 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jan 2026 last heard 9 Jan

Athena Aktipis’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

Trend

recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jan 2026 with 1.

Appearances

newest first · ▶ plays the moment

80,000 Hours Podcast · #144 Classic episode – Athena Aktipis on why cancer is a fundamental universal phenomena · 9 Jan 2026 podcast

And also the kinds of threats that you could have from a human cell that is trying to hijack a human body are specific in a way that you could get specific

anti-cancer mechanisms evolving for.

Versus if we're thinking about, you know, pathogens, we're thinking about viruses and, you know, bacteria and, you know, fungi, right?

You have so many different species, so many different mechanisms of action.

And so you can't just have, I mean, you have to get evolution on every one of those specific kinds of

Potential potential risks or or some, you know, general purpose systems, which we have as well.

But, yeah, I think, you know, it's worth that that perspective.

It's not just like, oh, you know, human cells versus pathogens.

It's like human cells is one kind of thing that could be an infection.

Yeah, there I mean, there's certainly I mean, viruses, right?

Like if they're inside a cell, they can replicate like crazy cancer cells.

I think, you know, the current thinking is that they, you know, can reproduce as quickly as, you know, 24 hours or a little less.

So they can get pretty, pretty fast.

But but you're absolutely right that there's there's just a much broader canvas on which to paint if you consider all of the potential pathogens that are out there in the world.

And so but also, I mean, we need to recognize that like.

There's a pretty big repertoire that cancer cells can access as well because our genomes have a lot of things that can be messed with to, you know, make these cells that do things that are evolutionarily unprecedented, at least for like what a cell in a multicellular body should do.

Yeah.

It all comes down to how you're defining cancer.

So there's like, you know, or sort of like, there's some like politics about that, right?

Like, you know, academic politics, right?

Showing 261–280 of 1,334 · page 14 of 67