Athena Aktipis
29 Aug 2025 - 28 Feb 2026
- Writer who I heard of from The Cheating Cell but she does a lot of interesting things. This is all from like 3 months of her twitter feed.
Cancer related
Agency/cooperation
- Cross-cultural invariances in the architecture of shame | PNAS on shame ok she didn't author his one, just plugged it on X
- Cooperation—The Ancient Technology That Never Goes Obsolete - John Templeton Foundation Templeton Foundation
- Cancer results from a tragedy of the commons
- She came out of studying evolution of cooperation.
- Mentions Hallmarks of Cancer which I should know better
- Metasteses has analog in ecological systems
- A problem of scaling up cooperation. Aktipis 2015, Evol Appl. The larger the group, opportunities for cheating go up.
- Human cheater detection (ref to Cosmides & Tooby).
- Why did multicellularity evolve in the first place? (why is easy, how is a more interesting question...me).
- Cheating cells is not a meatphor, cancer cells are actually taking advantage of cells who follow the rules.
- Multicellularity relies on:
- proliferation inhibition, controlled death
- resource allocation, division of labor, extracellular environment
- Not really surprised these match up, but OK.
- "cancer kept life unicellular for 2 billion years" "Live evolved to suppress evolution itself" (well the kind that happens in an individual body).
- Peto's paradox – cancer doesn't scale with body size (because larger animals have better suppression mechanisms)
- Agent-based model (in Aktipis 2012 Cancer Prevention Research)
- Not sure I understand the premises, but could read paper
- How is cheating detected?
- cell intrinsic: DNA damage, protein misfolding, etc
- neighborhood monitoring: adhesion, tissue architecture
- system-wide surveillance (immune system)
- TP53, the cheater detector of the genome
- integrates signals and decides. (Chen 2014)
- elephants have 40 copies of TP53!
- NSAIDS can reduce mutation rates by factor of 10 (?!!) and so slow down cancer.
- Adaptive therapy (Gatenby 2009) – only give therapy when tumor is growing (?) slows down resistance.
- Q: you are apply human metaphor to cells, more or less ("cheating"); is there any useful mappings the other way(that is can cancer control techniques be applied to human socail control).