AI in medicine: its potential to revolutionize disease prediction, diagnosis, and outcomes, causes for concern in medicine and beyond, and more | Isaac Kohane, M.D., Ph.D.

**Peter Attia** (0:11)
Hey everyone, welcome to the Drive Podcast. I'm your host, Peter Attia. This podcast, my website, and my weekly newsletter all focus on the goal of translating the science of longevity into something accessible for everyone.
Our goal is to provide the best content in health and wellness, and we've established a great team of analysts to make this happen. It is extremely important to me to provide all of this content without relying on paid ads. To do this, our work is made entirely possible by our members, and in return, we offer exclusive member-only content and benefits above and beyond what is available for free. If you want to take your knowledge of this space to the next level, it's our goal to ensure members get back much more than the price of a subscription. If you want to learn more about the benefits of our premium membership, head over to peterattiamd.com forward slash subscribe.
My guest this week is Isaac Kohane, who goes by Zak.
Zak is a physician scientist and chair of the Department of Biomedical Informatics at Harvard Medical School. And he's an associate professor of medicine at the Brigham and Women's Hospital. Zak has published several hundred papers in the medical literature and authored the widely used books, Microarrays for Integrative Genomics and The AI Revolution in Medicine, GPT-4 and Beyond. He is also the editor in chief of the newly launched New England Journal of Medicine AI.
In this episode, we talk about the evolution of AI. It wasn't really clear to me until we did this interview that we're really in the third generation of AI, and Zak has been a part of both the second and obviously the current generation. We talk about AI's abilities to impact medicine today. In other words, where is it having an impact? And where will it have an impact in the near term? What seems very likely? And of course, we talk about what the future can hold. And obviously here, you're starting to think a little bit about the difference between science fiction and potentially where we hope it could go. Very interesting podcast for me, really a topic I know so little about, which tend to be some of my favorite episodes. So without further delay, please enjoy my conversation with Zak Kohane.
Well, Zak, thank you so much for joining me today. This is a topic that's highly relevant and one that I've wanted to talk about for some time, but wasn't sure who to speak with and we eventually kind of found our way to you. So again, thanks for making the time and sharing your expertise. Give folks a little bit of a sense of your background. What was your path through medical school and training? It was not a very typical path.

**Isaac Kohane** (2:41)
No. So what happened was I grew up in Switzerland. Nobody in my family was a doctor. Come to United States, decide to major in biology. And then I get nerd sniped by computing back in the 70s, in the late 70s. And so I minor in computer science, but I still complete my degree in biology and I go to medical school. And then in the middle of medical school's first year, I realized, holy smokes, this is not what I expected. It's a noble profession, but it's not a science. It's an art. It's not a science. And I thought I was going into science.
And so I bail out for a while to do a PhD in computer science. And this is during the 1980s now, early 1980s. And it's a heyday of AI. It's actually second heyday. We're going through the third heyday. And it was a time of great promise. And with the retrospective scope, very clear that it was not going to be successful. There was a lot of overpromising. There is today. But unlike today, we had not released it to the public. It was not actually working in the way that we thought it was going to work.
And it certainly didn't scale. It was a very interesting period. And my thesis advisor, Peter Solovich, a professor at MIT, said, Zack, you should finish your clinical training because I'm not getting a lot of respect from clinicians. And so to bring rational decision making to the clinic, you really want to finish your clinical training. And so I finished medical school, did a residency in pediatrics, and then pediatric endocrinology, which was actually extremely enjoyable. But when I was done, I restarted my research in computing, started a lab at Children's Hospital in Boston, and then a center of biomedical informatics at the medical school. Like in almost every other endeavor, getting money gets attention from the powers that be. And so I was getting a lot of grants. And so they asked me to start the center and then eventually a new department of biomedical informatics that I'm the chair of. We have now 16 professors or assistant professors of biomedical informatics.