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.

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

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

You can have fruits that are genetically different from each other.

And you can...

get, you know, this process of natural selection really happening even like within a plant, you know, with different branches thriving versus others.

And yeah, and then like dropping branches, and sometimes those can actually grow into new trees.

I mean, the biology is just really different.

It's bonus.

Yeah, it's just it's so different from what, you know, what our sort of assumptions are as these, you know, like, honestly, not very resilient organisms that we are.

We think we're so awesome.

But like, you know, I mean, with the exception of like some, you know, fanciful Marvel movies, like we can't even regenerate a limb, you know, like it's we're kind of pathetic.

Yeah.

Yeah, it's embarrassing.

Yeah.

So but yeah, I think that, you know, that that broader frame of, you know, just thinking about, well, how does life, you know, solve these various problems?

How does life, you know, adapt, you know, during like, how do some organisms adapt during their lifetimes, like actually genetically adapt, not just behaviorally adapt?

I think that that's

expanding that frame is not just like really important for how we look at and think about biology but it's also really fun to like know these things right to like be like oh wow yeah that you know

That plant has got all of these unique mutations in different branches potentially that could lead to differential survival and reproduction.

It blows my mind.

And of course, it's not like all plants are the same.

There's all sorts of different ways that different plants work and different ways that their reproductive systems work.

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