Athena Aktipis

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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

So yeah, there's so much.

And I'm no plant expert.

I'm just a fan.

That's a great question.

And, you know, again, we have to think about definitions here, right?

Because a lot of elephants actually have growths, have tumors.

They're just not, you know, metastatic and cancerous and they don't, you know, threaten their lives so much.

But...

To kind of get back to your main question about, you know, why is, you know, an elephant less likely to die of cancer than we are or than a mouse is, right?

That's, I mean, that's a big contrast.

And to think about sort of those big picture issues, we have to consider that there's different selection pressures on organisms that are long-lived and large versus short-lived and small.

And long-lived large organisms, they have to invest a lot more in what we call somatic maintenance, which is just like a fancy way of saying like,

fixing your body and making sure that like the body maintains itself well.

So in order to have a chance at reproduction, a large, long-lived organism needs to be doing a lot more, you know, cellular things to take care of the body, including DNA repair, you know, monitoring for cellular cheating and all of that.

So organisms that are larger and longer-lived are

more robust cancer suppression mechanisms than organisms that are smaller and shorter lived.

And this ties in with an idea in evolutionary biology called life history theory, where it's basically- Yeah, can you explain that for a bit?

Yeah, yeah, sure.

So you've probably heard the phrase like live fast, diet.

young right like it's a you know it's something that's kind of part of our collective consciousness right there's this idea that you can kind of like have a strategy of you know like living for a long time and living slower or you could like live fast and you know potentially burn out for the long term

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