24 | Eric Topol on thinking big about AI in medicine

Eric Topol is a cardiologist, scientist, and author. Many twitter users will know Eric from his voice-of-reason tweets related to the covid pandemic. While Eric’s exceptionally broad scientific work includes genetics and clinical trials, his main focus is on the ways in which artificial intelligence may change medicine as we know it. Creativity in this field, Eric explains, lies in exploring applications of AI that no one thought possible before, such as predicting the risk of heart disease from an image of the retina. In our conversation, Eric encourages any scientist to think big, to be counterintuitive, to go against the dogma. To find exciting new ideas, he suggests to think about how cool new tools could be used in ways that are not obvious – and then to test-market your crazy ideas by discussing them with experts in the relevant fields.Eric Topol is the founder and director of the Scripps Research Translational Institute, a professor of Molecular Medicine at the Scripps Research Institute, and a senior consultant at the Division of Cardiovascular Diseases at Scripps Clinic in San Diego.For more information on Night Science, visit https://www.biomedcentral.com/collections/night-science .