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, you know, I actually I'm not sure how systematically that has been measured in elephants.

But but there is a general set of tradeoffs with, for example, wound healing and cell turnover and and cancer susceptibility.

So, you know, anytime you have a cellular system that.

I mean, so if we think of an organism that can heal a wound quickly, right?

What's going on there?

Well, the process of wound healing requires cells to be proliferating quickly and to be moving to close that wound.

And it's good to be able to do those things quickly, right?

Because if you don't, you're more likely to get an infection.

You're more likely to, you know, have your ability to do things impacted, right?

If you heal less quickly.

So there's a lot of benefits to being able to close a wound more rapidly than not.

But if you do that, you also have cells that are more likely to be on a hair trigger for increasing their proliferation and moving if the environment suggests that there's a wound.

And so one of the things that you actually sometimes see in tumors is that the physiology inside the tumor kind of looks like a wound that doesn't heal.

You know, we have like a set of buttons, the levers, right, that can kind of get pushed and that leaves us susceptible to cancer.

And so, you know, the more rapidly...

your wounds can heal, potentially the more susceptible, you know, those organisms will be to cancer because the cells are, you know, sort of erring on the side of being able to heal wounds quickly so that they, you know, are less likely to die of infection, less likely to have functionality impacted for as long.

Yeah, absolutely.

That's a really important part of life history theory, which is, you know, what are the selection pressures, right, that make it more likely that an organism is going to evolve to be a fast life history strategist versus a slow life history strategist and having what's called, you know, high extrinsic mortality, right, like having the

chance that you will die from something random in the environment, if that's high, then the organisms will evolve to invest less in somatic maintenance because it could just be gone like that.

So, you know, versus situations where the resources are a little bit more stable, then you get selection for slow life history strategies.

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