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

Another one is that the larger and more complex a group is,

all else being equal, the easier it will be for cheating to arise and go undetected and potentially undermine the system unless you have other mechanisms there that can sort of, you know, protect, monitor, respond.

And so, you know, that last idea, that last sort of, you know, thread is really what the big picture inspiration was for the book, The Cheating Cell, right?

thinking about our bodies as this cooperative system and as cancer, you know, as a breakdown of that cellular cooperation.

But, yeah, you know, big picture is we can look at cooperation at all these different levels and using different methods, right?

And so that's another thing that, like, has been really...

important to me in my career is not just having one methodological approach or one disciplinary approach.

So, you know, bringing anthropological fieldwork together with, you know, psychology experiments together with computational modeling, and, you know, doing all of that also in the context of considering policy implications, ethical implications, and having that be part of the same

The same research project, you know, not splitting those things out and then, you know, having like one one, you know, place where you're like, oh, let's try to bring it all together.

No, it's like part of the process is having all those things happening at the same time.

getting that cross-fertilization and being able to, you know, be truly interdisciplinary as a result.

So that's what I love.

And that's, you know, a lot of what I've been doing in my career up until this point and hope to continue to do.

The opposite of cancer, I would say, is multicellular cooperation.

You know, so basically the opposite of cancer is us.

It's having a functional multicellular body that is cooperating effectively in order to make that multicellular body function.

Sure.

So we can look at multicellularity as arising as a result of five foundations of multicellular cooperation that made it possible.

Inhibition of proliferation, the control of cell death,

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