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

Early, early on when I was just starting to, you know, really kind of bring these ideas together about cooperation theory and cancer, where, you know, basically, you know, the idea was like, how can we like write a rap about cancer?

cancer from an evolutionary perspective and you know the cooperation theory perspective and and what he ended up doing was taking the perspective of a cancer cell um that is not happy with being stuck in this body and having to do all of the things that are you know required and um yeah

It was it was a really great way, you know, for me to to really shift my perspective.

And it's also just really fun.

So, you know, it's called Revenge of the Somatic.

If you, you know.

want to look it up, it like starts, you know, my forefathers were free, but I was born a slave, I keep the memory of freedom in my DNA, right?

So it's like, okay, like, we're setting up a, you know, totally, totally different frame for for thinking about it.

But it really does draw that parallel between, you know, what's going on in the cellular societies of the body.

And some of these things that, you know, we think about on a on a social level.

So yeah,

So anyway, so that's my like big digression.

But, you know, but we can bring it back to like these, you know, foundations of multicellularity.

We can think about, OK, you know, is there an analogy for, you know, cellular suicide and, you know, for forced cell death?

And it's like, well, you know, hmm.

You know, there's analogies, but like, that's not something that happens a lot, I think, in modern society.

Although, you know, there's some situations where like, if people are being forced to do something that they think is going to damage their, you know, their families, their countries, right, that, you know, they will die.

swallow the pill to get themselves out of the system so that they don't end up doing something damaging, right?

So I think at the very extreme case, you can maybe see some examples of this, but mostly that those kinds of processes aren't really going on, I think, in human societies.

But division of labor, we see a lot of that, you know, resource distribution, you know, reallocation of resources, moving things around so they can get from one place to another.

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