The Future of Medicine

Odette Harris, MD, MPH, Professor of Neurosurgery and the Paralyzed Veterans of America Professor of Spinal Cord Medicine at Stanford, joins The Future of Medicine for a conversation about concussion, traumatic brain injury, and what it takes to change how medicine thinks about the brain. The conversation was recorded in front of a live Medicine Grand Rounds audience. Dr. Harris has spent her care...

Pascal Geldsetzer, MD, PhD, Assistant Professor of Medicine in Primary Care and Population Health at Stanford, joins The Future of Medicine to discuss a striking line of research: evidence that shingles vaccination may reduce the risk of dementia. Geldsetzer and his team study “natural experiments” — real-world situations that can allow researchers to get closer to determining cause and effect wit...

Jyothi Tirumalasetty, MD, a Stanford Medicine allergist, immunologist, and researcher, joins The Future of Medicine to explain an overlooked source of health care emissions: the propellants used in many common asthma inhalers. In this episode, Dr. Tirumalasetty explains how metered-dose inhalers, including many commonly prescribed albuterol inhalers, use hydrofluorocarbon propellants to deliver me...

Stanford hematologist and microbiome researcher Ami Bhatt, MD, PhD, joins The Future of Medicine to explore the microbes living in and on us—and how understanding their evolution could help scientists tackle hospital infections and develop new approaches to cancer therapy. In this episode, Dr. Bhatt explains why the microbiome is far more dynamic than a collection of bacteria living in the gut. Mi...

Ash Alizadeh, MD, PhD, a Stanford hematologist-oncologist and physician-scientist, joins The Future of Medicine for a conversation about cancer blood tests, DNA, early detection, and the growing ability to find traces of cancer that traditional scans may not yet reveal. Alizadeh has helped pioneer approaches that search for tiny amounts of tumor DNA circulating in the bloodstream. In this episode,...

Ross L. Levine, MD, Chief Scientific Officer at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, joins The Future of Medicine for a conversation about blood cancer, cancer genetics, and how a laboratory discovery can eventually lead to new treatments. More than 20 years ago, Levine helped discover a genetic change in JAK2, a gene that plays an important role in controlling blood cell growth. When JAK2 is a...

Clarence Braddock, MD, MPH, a nationally recognized medical educator and former Executive Vice Dean and Vice Dean for Education in the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA, joins Euan Ashley on The Future of Medicine to explore how we train future doctors, why changing long-established systems can be so difficult, and what leaders often misunderstand about creating meaningful change. Braddock d...

What can fasting teach us about aging, and can the body receive some of its benefits without giving up food completely? Valter Longo, PhD, professor of gerontology and biological sciences, director of the Longevity Institute at the University of Southern California, and author of The Longevity Diet, joins The Future of Medicine for a wide-ranging conversation about nutrition, fasting-mimicking die...

How can medical AI help doctors make better decisions while preserving clinical judgment and human connection? Travis Zack, MD, PhD, an oncologist, researcher, and chief medical officer of OpenEvidence, joins The Future of Medicine to discuss the future of AI in clinical care. OpenEvidence is an AI-powered platform that helps clinicians find and understand information from peer-reviewed medical re...

Michael Osterholm, PhD, MPH, one of the world’s leading experts on infectious disease threats and pandemic preparedness, joins The Future of Medicine for a wide-ranging conversation about COVID-19, vaccines, airborne transmission, public trust, and what the world must do before the next pandemic arrives. Osterholm is director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the Universi...

Dr. Michelle Mello, professor of law and health policy at Stanford University, joins The Future of Medicine for a conversation about one of the most frustrating and consequential parts of American healthcare: prior authorization. For many patients and clinicians, prior authorization is the process behind the letter saying an insurance company will not cover a medication, procedure, or service unle...

Dr. Anthony Fauci, former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and one of the nation’s most influential public health leaders, joins Stanford Department of Medicine’s The Future of Medicine for a conversation with Dr. Euan Ashley about science, service, public trust, and the future of public health. In this episode, Dr. Fauci reflects on his early career as a physi...

Dr. Christopher J.L. Murray — health economist at the University of Washington, physician, and founder of the Global Burden of Disease framework — joins The Future of Medicine to discuss what decades of data across 204 countries reveal about human health, and where it's headed by the end of this century. Dr. Murray's Global Burden of Disease project involves 19,000 collaborators in 167 c...

Dr. Samuel Klein, Division Chief and William H. Danforth Professor of Medicine and Nutritional Science at Washington University Medicine, joins The Future of Medicine for a conversation about obesity, metabolism, insulin resistance, and the revolution sparked by GLP-1 medications like Ozempic. In this episode, Dr. Klein explains why obesity is far more biologically complex than many people realize...

In this episode of the Future of Medicine, we welcome Dr. Robert Wachter, physician, author, and chair of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco, for a conversation about artificial intelligence, healthcare, and the future of medicine. Dr. Wachter reflects on how the digitization of healthcare reshaped modern medicine — and why many of the frustrations clinicians experience today,...

In this episode of the Future of Medicine, we welcome Crystal Mackall, the Ernest and Amelia Gallo Family Professor and founding director of the Stanford Center for Cancer Cell Therapy at Stanford, for a conversation on CAR T-cell therapy, pediatric cancer, and the future of biologic medicine. Dr. Mackall reflects on her path from a working-class town in Ohio to becoming one of the world’s leading...

In this episode of The Future of Medicine, we welcome Stephen Quake, a bioengineer, physicist, and serial entrepreneur whose innovations have transformed how we measure biology and deliver care. Dr. Quake shares how his early fascination with building and experimentation led him from physics into biology, where he helped pioneer microfluidics, enabling the automation of complex biological experime...

In this episode of The Future of Medicine, we welcome Yvonne "Bonnie" Maldonado, pediatrician and infectious disease expert at Stanford, for a powerful conversation on vaccines, public health, and the fragile progress of modern medicine. Dr. Maldonado reflects on the lessons behind her Grand Rounds talk, “Lessons from a House on Fire,” drawing from the global eradication of smallpox, one...

In this episode of The Future of Medicine , we welcome Priscilla Chan, MD, pediatrician and co-founder of Biohub, a first-of-its-kind research initiative combining frontier AI with frontier biology to accelerate progress toward curing or preventing all disease. Dr. Chan shares how her experience caring for children with rare and undiagnosed conditions shaped her commitment to transforming how scie...

In this episode of The Future of Medicine, we welcome Jonathan Chen, MD, PhD, clinician, AI researcher, and Associate Professor at Stanford, whose work focuses on combining human and artificial intelligence to improve clinical decision-making. Dr. Chen reflects on the rapid rise of AI in medicine, and the moment he realized everything had changed. He also walks through surprising findings from his...

In this episode of The Future of Medicine, we welcome Eric Topol, MD, cardiologist, scientist, bestselling author of Super Agers, and founder of the Scripps Research Translational Institute, whose work has helped shape the field of digital medicine and the use of data, genomics, and artificial intelligence to personalize care. Dr. Topol reflects on how medicine is shifting from treating disease to...

In this episode of The Future of Medicine, we welcome Alexis Thompson, MD, MPH, pediatric hematologist and internationally recognized expert on sickle cell disease whose work helped lead to the first approved gene therapies for this serious condition. Dr. Thompson reflects on the extraordinary transformation of sickle cell care over the course of her career. From the early days of newborn screenin...

In this episode of The Future of Medicine, we welcome Kirsten Bibbins-Domingo, PhD, MD, MAS, physician, epidemiologist, and Editor-in-Chief of JAMA, whose work sits at the center of how today’s most influential medical research is evaluated, communicated, and translated into practice. Dr. Bibbins-Domingo takes us inside the high-stakes world of scientific publishing, exploring how editors weigh ev...

In this episode of The Future of Medicine, we welcome Mark Skylar-Scott, PhD, bioengineer and researcher at Stanford University, whose work sits at the forefront of 3D bioprinting, tissue engineering, and regenerative medicine. Dr. Skylar-Scott explores the bold challenge of organ manufacturing — why it’s one of the hardest problems in medicine, and why there is good reason for optimism. He explai...

In this episode of The Future of Medicine, we welcome Anna Lembke, MD, psychiatrist and professor at Stanford School of Medicine, and author of the bestselling book, Dopamine Nation . In this conversation, Dr. Lembke explores how modern life reshapes our brains — from digital media and compulsive overconsumption to addiction, recovery, and the science of pleasure and pain. She explains why “the mo...