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

mechanisms for resource transfer, right?

Because as you get bigger, you can't just rely on diffusion for resources.

You have to somehow get resources into the middle, basically, of a clump of cells.

And you also have division of labor, right?

So having multiple cell types can do multiple jobs, different expression states, things like that.

And then you have the creation and maintenance of the extracellular environment, right?

So this is all of the things that are on the outside of the cell that make the organism more viable, proteins that are produced, the matrix in which all the cells are embedded.

And that's an environment that can be

you know, really healthy or it can be quite literally polluted by, you know, acids and things like that if cells are, you know, being wasteful and messy, which they can be, right?

So they can sort of be, you know, cheaters in that sense of polluting their environment.

So you have these five foundations of multicellular cooperation.

And what we see with cancer is a breakdown in each of those, right?

So cells will proliferate when they shouldn't.

They won't die when they should.

They avoid apoptosis.

They won't engage in the kind of division of labor that they should.

Right.

They will not sort of do the jobs that they're supposed to do.

They'll monopolize resources and they will trash the environment.

And so you can get a breakdown in all of these foundations of multicellular cooperation.

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