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

So some people are like, oh, you can't call that cancer.

But if you're asking, you know, do you get disruptions in cell proliferation and apoptosis and

differentiation of cells, right, the division of labor, like all those things, the answer is yes.

You, you know, essentially any multicellular lineage that you look at, you see examples of at least, you know, what we could call cancer-like cells.

phenomena where, you know, cells are proliferating when they shouldn't, you know, for the sort of survival or reproduction of the organism.

And where, you know, you can have disruption of the division of labor of the, you know, differentiation of the cells.

Yeah.

So there's actually one of one of the things that happened like early on in my like interest in cancer was that I actually came here to Arizona before I lived here and saw a crested saguaro cactus.

Now, this is a pretty, pretty awesome thing.

There's a decent number of them around here where rather than, you know, having like a, you know, that sort of classic shape right where they have like, you know,

one or a few right you know kind of trunks coming out I mean you get this like crown kind of on the top it's just like fans out it's beautiful and I was like wow that is you know that really is like a plant cancer you have this disruption in the growth and when I looked into the physiology of it

They basically have a situation where, you know, the growth tip like, you know, on the tip of any any plant that's growing, usually a few cells that are, you know, they're called meristem cells are basically like the plant equivalent of stem cells.

And they as they proliferate, they create like, you know, sort of linear thing.

But you can get a disruption where rather than like just a few cells in a little clump, you have some cells in a line.

And then what ends up happening is as those cells are all proliferating, they start to kind of like, you know, fan out.

And you get like, you know, all these almost like brain-like patterns or crown-like patterns.

And so in a way with faciation, it's called faciation, it's almost more visible.

You can see.

Right, yeah.

So I think it's a really cool lens to think about, you know, like what happens with cancer.

Showing 281–300 of 1,334 · page 15 of 67