“Up until three years ago, we didn’t really have access to AI.” Eric Topol, a cardiologist who has spent decades arguing that medicine should lean on data, said that in an interview with Scientific American. His point was practical: researchers used to be stuck with narrow, mostly self-supervised work on medical images, and now they can feed models layered, multidimensional data they could not touch before.
That sits comfortably with a career built around the idea. Topol is executive vice president of Scripps Research, which describes itself as the largest nonprofit biomedical research institute in the United States. According to the institution’s faculty profile, he founded the Scripps Research Translational Institute in 2007 and directs it. He remains clinically active.
From Rochester to Cleveland
The record is easy to follow. Topol earned his medical degree at the University of Rochester in 1979, after a biomedicine degree at the University of Virginia in 1975. He then trained in internal medicine at the University of California, San Francisco, and as a cardiology fellow at Johns Hopkins. Michigan gave him a tenured professorship in 1985.
In 1991 he took over cardiovascular medicine at the Cleveland Clinic, a post he held until 2006. The profile says he led that department to the top rank among American heart centers, and that he founded the clinic’s Lerner College of Medicine, serving as its provost from 2002 to 2005. These are the institution’s own claims. At one point the UK government also commissioned him to lead a review of the National Health Service.
Papers, books and honors
He has published more than 1,300 peer-reviewed articles, which the profile says have drawn over 400,000 citations. He sits in the National Academy of Medicine. TIME put him on its first TIME100 Health list in 2024, and in 2025 US News named him among 25 Best Leaders in the country.
Four bestselling books carry his argument to a general audience: The Creative Destruction of Medicine, The Patient Will See You Now, Deep Medicine: How Artificial Intelligence Can Make Healthcare Human Again, and Super Agers, on longevity. He also writes a weekly newsletter and podcast, Ground Truths, on Substack.
What he says now
His comments on American research are less rosy. Funding is a struggle, he said, and even awarded grants arrive slowly. Chinese science, in his words, is moving at an exponential pace and towering over leading journals, so the United States can no longer assume it is the dominant player in life science. Young scientists, he added, are being passed over and drifting into industry.
On what lies ahead he separated hope from evidence. He is not especially bullish on the new cures now being discussed, but he expects a future capacity to prevent diseases that medicine has never had. His advice to early-career scientists was to get grounded in AI, including vibe coding and multiagent tools.
Consult your doctor for medical advice.
Sources
- Eric Topol, MD – Scripps Research
- Scripps scientist Eric Topol on the advances revolutionizing how we understand disease
