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

Yeah, there's potentially a lot of, you know, inadvertent trade-offs that, you know, could arise.

There's also, you know, a sort of tough bind of like, you know, if you want to extend life by reducing the risk of cancer and you interfere with things like cell proliferation and, you know, the sort of

rejuvenation of tissues that stem cells help us do, right?

It's like, well, how do you have your evolutionary cake and eat it too?

You know, how do you both, like, you know, make sure that the organism is, you know, renewing itself properly, while at the same time, not allowing that renewal capacity to get hijacked by, you know, agents that could

Yeah.

So, you know, and this is part of why cancer is such a tricky problem is because you run up against all of these tradeoffs.

And, you know, if you, you know, you think you've got it like cornered over here, but then, you know, you've got like all these things happening over here.

So you're like, oh, wait, no, I got to get over here.

So it's it is a is a slippery thing to think of, you know, OK, well, you know, how would we how would we eliminate cancer?

And what would we lose if we tried to eliminate cancer?

Right.

So it's there are a lot of tradeoffs and we're not going to get around that because cancer is a susceptibility that is just built in to being a multicellular organism.

You know, we can we can evolve a lot of mechanisms to detect it, to respond to it.

And those systems can evolve to be pretty good in terms of, you know, the efficiency and, you know, reducing side effects and tradeoffs and things like that.

But there are fundamental tradeoffs that we just can't escape.

Yeah, yeah.

I mean, the better a job that you want to do at sort of avoiding these tradeoffs, also the more complex all the systems have to be, which then in itself creates vulnerabilities for the system to be more hijackable.

So, you know, like there is a lot that that, you know, can potentially happen.

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