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, well...

So this is sort of the, you know, idea that like you can have like a hyper cancer or like a meta cancer, right?

And I think, you know, in practice, yeah, anytime that you have cooperation, say you have a cluster of cells that are all, you know, producing growth factors, you know, if you get a mutant that stops producing that growth factor, right?

They can potentially gain an advantage as long as they're in an environment where growth factors are being produced, right?

So whether or not you get the evolution of cheating or the extended evolution of cheating is going to be dependent on being able to sort of maintain a population of entities that you can keep exploiting.

Um, so there's, you know, I think there, there are some barriers to like, you know, cancer cells, even kind of getting, uh, getting to the point where, where you would have the evolution of sort of like hyper tumors or hyper cancers, just because constantly sort of at every stage, you know, you have cheaters that like, you know, emerge and are sort of getting purged because of the population structure or, you

Yeah, because I mean, the thing is, like, yes, within any group, right, the cheaters are going to do better than the others in the group.

But once you expand your frame, and you realize, oh, there are multiple groups, this is like a meta population.

Some groups are more stable than others, right?

And the groups that are more stable than others tend to be the ones that are more cooperative.

Then, you know, that actually really changes the dynamics a lot and makes it so that cooperation can be favored.

You know, so...

So you can get dynamics like that happening with the blood supply to tumors.

So, you know, basically, you know, the cells can be

signaling, you know, for more resources and sort of opening up the taps, right, from the circulatory system.

Yeah.

And, you know, and as that happens, actually, you know, it's very similar to what, you know, like an irrigation system where the upstream individuals, if they open up the taps all the way, you know, they're depriving the downstream individuals of

And, you know, actually, you can also get the collapse of the sort of infrastructure, because if all the taps are opened up, then you don't have enough pressure inside the vessels to maintain the flow.

So, you know, you can get this sort of like, you know, collapse, it's like civilizational collapse, right?

Because of basically exploiting of the commons, you know, like not...

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