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

you know, prevent the things that you don't want and cultivate the things that you do want.

I mean, yeah.

So, but, but it is really, it really is.

It's a mental shift to thinking, okay, well, how do we live with cancer?

You know?

And, and I think, uh, cross species perspective, uh,

is useful not just because we can learn things from other species about how they suppress cancer or deal with it, but also because it, I think, forces us to just think more broadly about the fact that living with cancer is the norm for multicellular life.

And so if we can be more deliberate about using our technology and our abilities to

gather information, process it ourselves, right, then that opens up a whole new space for, you know, treating and preventing cancer differently that leverages, you know, the brains that we have here and the network brains that we all have, you know, and all of the, like, really rich theory that's been developed in evolutionary biology and ecology, you know, over, you know, the decades, centuries.

Yeah.

So I think there's been some newer studies on this, too, that I think maybe challenged just how large that effect was.

But the original studies that were done, yeah, they basically looked like people who were taking these NSAIDs had lower likelihood of progressing from this early cancer-like state called Barrett's esophagus, where you have sort of what's called dysplasia, where cells are

in the wrong places and growing, you know, in ways that they shouldn't in the esophagus, lower likelihood of progressing to cancer.

And that seemed to be related to a, you know, decrease in mutation rate that was associated with it and said, so, you know, it may be that, you know, because of sort of evolutionary mismatch, we have just higher inflammation than, you know, is ideal because of, you know, toxins or, you know, exposures to

more pathogens, things like that that could be kind of kicking our body into a state of inflammation.

Because inflammation is another situation where there's trade-offs, right?

It's like you have higher inflammation, yeah, maybe it's less likely that you'll have an acute problem with a pathogen, but you're creating an environment that's potentially more pro-cancer because it's basically being more permissive of cells doing things that...

Yeah, could.

Yeah, yeah.

Yeah, I mean, there are some parallels and there's also some, you know, places where the analogy you could say breaks down.

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