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**Malcolm Gladwell** (0:02)
I'm Malcolm Gladwell, and you're listening to Smart Talks with IBM.
When Dr. Lara Jehi began treating epilepsy patients in the early 2000s, she noticed something unsettling. Different surgeons could look at the exact same case and recommend completely different treatments. One surgeon might remove one part of the brain, another a different part, and a third might not operate at all. Dr. Jehi believed there had to be a better way, one grounded in data. That conviction set her on a path that would lead her to become Chief Research Information Officer at Cleveland Clinic and the executive program lead for the Discovery Accelerator. The Discovery Accelerator is a 10-year partnership between Cleveland Clinic and IBM, where researchers are using AI and quantum computing to make incredible discoveries in healthcare and life sciences. I sat down with Dr. Jehi to explore what's happening now, what's possible with quantum computing, and where this next era of biomedical discovery is headed.
Epilepsy was your specialty within neurology.

**Lara Jehi** (1:13)
Correct, yes.

**Malcolm Gladwell** (1:13)
What led you to that?

**Lara Jehi** (1:15)
I was always fascinated by the brain. It's the part of our body that lives still to this day, the most to be discovered. So I was always intrigued by areas that leave more for discovery.
Epilepsy was my pragmatic side, wanting to choose a sub-specialty where the problem can be fixed. In epilepsy, there are many medications that are very effective, and there's a brain surgery that we can do to stop seizures when medicines don't work.
That attracted me compared to other areas in neurology, like stroke, for example, or dementia, where usually the damage is more definite. I wanted to be able to tell my patients that you have a big problem, but here's what I can do to fix it. And epilepsy offered me that.

**Malcolm Gladwell** (2:10)
But there must have been interesting and intriguing unsolved problems in neurology.

**Lara Jehi** (2:19)
Oh my gosh, it's the whole brain, isn't it? Before starting to deal with artificial intelligence in research, in neurology, I'm dealing with real intelligence, the human brain, and how it works, and how we think, and how we make decisions, and how it can grow and evolve. And so there is many untapped questions in neurology, and that's part of the fascination in it. In epilepsy, in particular, it's an electrical disease in the brain. It's actually one of the conditions in neurology that's a perfect alignment of all of the scientific disciplines. It's biology, and physics, and chemistry, all working together to make us who we truly are, right? So every other discipline, if you think of computing, for example, it's purely electricity, or if we do drug development or drug discovery, that's mostly chemistry. Experiments in the lab, that's mostly biology. But the human brain is all of those put together.
The cells in our brain secrete these chemical substances that diffuse everywhere and hook up where they need to, to trigger certain circuits, and then trigger some effects afterwards. So it was just an elegant science that has big impacts.

**Malcolm Gladwell** (4:00)
We're shortly going to get there and talk about, you've taken on this very technology-focused role at Cleveland Clinic. I'm curious about, if we go back to when you were just starting out at Cleveland Clinic.

**Lara Jehi** (4:13)
Yeah.

**Malcolm Gladwell** (4:14)
How much were you thinking about this technology piece, about what technology could do for your specialty, about was that on your mind or is this something you've come to more recently?

**Lara Jehi** (4:26)
Well, it's been a journey. When I started training as a clinician, my priority was just to learn how to better care for my patients and how to be a better physician. Then I realized that clinical practice provides an immediate reward. I'm interacting with a human being and helping them in the moment, so there is that immediate reward that comes with that. But that wasn't enough.
I wanted something more, so then I learned biomedical research practices, and research offered me this path towards a future. The reward there is more long-term.
I'm studying, discovering things that could help many people in the future even though I will never get to see them or meet them, or have that immediate satisfaction. That shifted me from being a pure clinician to being a clinician-scientist. And as that journey progressed, it became very clear as medicine evolved over the past 20 years that we cannot do any good biomedical research without understanding data and technology. The balance is shifting from most of the research is happening, we call it on the wet bench with actual experiments, physical experiments to a place where most of the work is happening through compute and simulations and data. So I became much more involved for my personal research in building big data models and learning about AI and learning about technology in general.