Multicellular cooperation

Multicellular cooperation is the set of coordinated behaviors that make a body work: restraint of proliferation, respect for cell-death signals, regulated resource use, division of labor, and maintenance of the shared extracellular environment.

Cooperation as enforceable agreements

Athena Aktipis frames these behaviors as agreements among cells — agreements that only hold if the body enforces them, because each cell retains the replicators and metabolic machinery of independent ancestors. The enforcement mechanisms are the familiar systems of cancer biology: p53-mediated arrest and death, apoptosis pathways, telomere limits, and immune surveillance. Each makes defection costly to the defecting cell.

Cancer as cheating

In this framing, cancer is what happens when cells break