Episode Details

Siddhartha Mukherjee is a Professor at Columbia University, oncologist, and extraordinary author of Emperor of All Maladies (which was awarded a Pulitzer Prize), The Gene, and The Song of the Cell, along with outstanding pieces in the New Yorker. He is one of the top thought leaders in medicine of our era.

“I have begun to imagine, think about what it would be to be a digital human..”—Sid Mukherjee

Eric Topol (00:06):

Well, hello, this is Eric Topol with Ground Truths, and I am delighted to have my friend Sid Mukherjee, to have a conversation about all sorts of interesting things. Sid, his most recent book, SONG OF THE CELL is extraordinary. And I understand, Sid, you're working on another book that may be cell related. Is that right?

Sid Mukherjee  (00:30):

Eric, it's not cell related, I would say, but it's AI and death related, and it covers, broadly speaking, it covers AI, longevity and death and memory —topics that I think are universal, but also particularly medicine.

Eric Topol (00:57):

Well, good, and we'll get into that. I had somehow someone steered me that your next book was going to be something building on the last one, but that sounds even more interesting. You're going in another direction. You've covered cancer gene cells, so I think covering this new topic is of particularly interest. So let's get into the AI story and maybe we'll start off with your views on the healthcare side. Where do you think this is headed now?

A.I. and Drug Discovery

Sid Mukherjee  (01:29):

So I think Eric, there are two very broad ways of dividing where AI can enter healthcare, and there may be more, I'm just going to give you two, but there may be more. One is on what I would call the deep science aspect of it, and by that I mean AI-based drug discovery, AI-based antibody discovery, AI-based modeling. All of which use AI tools but are using tools that have to do with machine learning, but may have to do less directly with the kind of large language models. These tools have been in development for a long time. You and I are familiar with them. They are tools. Very simply put, you can imagine that the docking of a drug to a protein, so imagine every drug, every medicine as a small spaceship that docks onto a large spaceship, the large spaceship being the target.

(02:57):

So if you think of it that way, there are fundamental rules. If anyone's watched Star Wars or any of these sci-fi films, there are fundamental rules by which that govern the way that the small spaceship in this case, a molecule like aspirin fits into a pocket of its target, and those are principles that are determined entirely by chemistry and physics, but they can be taught, you can learn what kind of spaceship or molecule is likely to fit into what kind of po