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

Altruism, easy, easy to get altruism among kin.

And yes, but you don't actually have 100% aligned interests.

And from the perspective of the genes that you inherit from your father, the...

mother's body and the mother's future capacity for reproduction is not really relevant unless they're a partnership for life and there's no other possibilities of the female having offspring with other males.

So you have a situation where it's in the best interests, evolutionarily speaking, of

of the genes from the father to extract more resources from the mother's body, then what would be optimal for the mother, who is presumably, you know, trying in evolutionary terms to more like equalize investment over present and potential future offspring?

Maybe not 100% equal, but, you know, having a distribution that is closer to equal.

And

So this, you know, kind of makes sense in theoretical level.

But the absolutely crazy thing is that this manifests in the way that genes are tagged.

So the epigenetic tags that are on genes, depending on whether they come from the maternal side or the paternal side.

And the genes that come from the paternal side, they tend to be expressing genes that increase the resource delivery to the fetus while the mother is pregnant.

And the genes that are coming from the mother's side, they're basically tagged in a way that makes them interfere with the transfer of resources that

the paternal genes have kind of turned up.

And similar things are going on with growth factors and other processes that have to do with the transfer of resources from the mother's body to the fetus.

Now,

All that being said, there is a huge range of sort of shared interests where it's like, yes, it's in the maternal interest to transfer these resources and it's in the fetus's overall interest and paternal interest to get those resources.

So there doesn't have to be a serious conflict, but things can escalate into situations where there's serious conflict.

And in fact, preeclampsia is a result

of the escalation of genetic conflict where essentially the mother system is shutting down the resource transfer in terms of the structure of the blood vessels and the fetal system is then upregulating signaling that increases the blood pressure.

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