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

If it is the result of many generations of selection on a, you know, collective phenotype or set of collective phenotypes.

Yeah.

So two things.

So one thing is there are a lot of, there are many different processes that are all sort of going on.

It's not just TP53, but it is the case that, you know, like you said, all of this information is kind of flowing through, you know, TP53.

And that's the case for many of these other systems where, you know, there is sort of one point where if you break that point, then the whole system can get messed up.

And, yeah, so then the question is why, you know, why have that sort of, why have everything flowing in to one spot and then flowing out?

And one potential explanation for why this is the case is that, you know, in order for a cell to really sort of figure out if there's a problem or not with the cellular behavior, it needs to integrate information from many, many different sources.

So, you know, for example, earlier we were talking about, you know, wound healing, right?

You know, it would be important to know, right, if the reason that the cell is proliferating and moving has to do with being in an environment where that's actually what is beneficial for the organism, right?

Is this a wound healing situation or is it not?

And in order to be able to integrate information from all of those different systems,

sources, at some point, it all has to come together.

And so you can potentially have, you know, these sort of points of vulnerability, because you need to integrate information across a lot of different

domains I guess you could say in order to actually sort of make a smart decision you know in scare quotes right so for the because it has a very different meaning right you could say for a cell to be proliferating and moving if it's in a wound healing environment versus if it's in a normal tissue environment so the downstream consequence of what should happen is gonna be different in those two cases

Yeah, some of them are not functional.

But yeah, so you can get genomes with multiple CEOs, I guess you could say.

But then the question is, what happens with those over evolutionary time?

Do they continue to process the same information?

Do they differentiate into processing sort of different streams of information?

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