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

Not a good resource regulation set of mechanisms there.

So that kind of dynamic does happen.

But there are a lot of other places where you can get the evolution of cooperation and cheating.

And honestly, to me, the scariest thing about...

cancer is the cooperation side.

And I think that we've talked a little bit about this kind of like working from first principles to make some predictions.

And I think if we look at this from a first principles kind of perspective, it's quite likely that early on in the

the dissemination of cancer.

So, you know, you have a primary tumor, but then you can get metastasis, right, which is the real problem in cancer usually, right?

It's the, you know, systemic dissemination of these cells.

I think it's quite likely that

by the time you have a metastasis that is visible in any sort of screening, that very often that might have really come from a long lineage of

clusters of cancer cells that were sort of selected on the basis of being already able to cooperate effectively in order to extract resources, reproduce, and move.

So my colleagues and I have written about this some, and I wrote some about this in my book, but I think it's one of the sort of most neglected but most important evolutionary dynamics and evolutionary processes

that is going on in cancer, potentially going on in cancer.

So when we look at metastasis, we might be looking at something that is actually the result of many, many, many generations of selection on group-level phenotypes of cancer cells already.

So that's something that I think... It's a very evolved beast.

Yeah.

So I think that requires a lot more attention.

That possibility requires a lot more attention than it has had up until this point, because it has, you know, very different implications for how we might be treating metastasis, right?

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