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

And, you know, I mean, I like thinking about it in these sort of information processing terms more generally, because, you know, I think that we tend to sort of look at the cells in our body as like, you know, oh, they're just like, you know, blobs of biological stuff, but actually they're computational systems, right?

That are taking in, you know, huge amounts of complex information, processing it and then changing, you know, gene expression as a result.

And every one of our 30 trillion cells is doing it every millisecond.

Right.

So it's it's mind blowing.

And I think it forces us to consider possibilities for the kinds of things that might be going on in our bodies that we might otherwise think of as impossible or anthropomorphic.

But no, because there's actually a lot of information constantly being processed by every single cell.

Yeah, yeah.

So, I mean, whether you want to call it like a tumor or not depends on like how scared you are of the word tumor, right?

But I do think that there are situations where if there's a mutation or there's sort of a disruption in the...

sort of local environment in a particular spot in the body, that it can actually, you know, there's a situation where it can make sense to have a clone proliferate that doesn't have a high chance of going on to be cancerous so that it can take up that ecological space.

So, you know, wound healing would be one scenario.

situation where, you know, perhaps it makes sense in some contexts for cells to take over those sort of, you know, open ecological spaces that are good at replicating quickly, perhaps because they have some mutations that might, you know, in some cases be associated with cancer, but are less likely to actually

create more vulnerabilities in the medium term or long term.

And so, yeah, this is, you know, it's a...

Yeah, I think it's a counterintuitive idea, but there's, you know, there's some evidence that, you know, you do have these sort of, you know, hot spots for mutation where, you know, if you do get a situation like a wound, it might be more likely that you get a mutant arise that sort of allows for that quick proliferation, but doesn't create other vulnerabilities that arise.

you might get if it was just sort of any random mutation that could confer some selective advantage for the cells.

Well, I mean, you're absolutely right that the population size is critical for sort of, you know, what's the likelihood that you'll get the emergence of a mutation that might, you know, affect any aspect of physiology.

So if there's smaller population sizes and, you know, regions where there's lower resources, that's going to certainly affect the likelihood that a mutation would arise.

But then the question is, if you have a mutation that affects

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