Eric Topol

Eric Topol was born June 26, 1954, trained as a cardiologist, and by the 2010s had become one of American medicine's most visible futurists. He founded and directs the Scripps Research Translational Institute in La Jolla, California, where he also holds professorships and consults in cardiovascular medicine. In 2016 the National Institutes of Health handed him a $207 million grant to lead a major arm of the Precision Medicine Initiative - a million-person research cohort; that funding was renewed in 2023 for $282 million over five years. Between 2018 and 2019 the UK government commissioned him to plan how genomics, AI, and digital tools should reshape the National Health Service's future workforce. He has written four bestsellers on where medicine is headed: The Creative Destruction of Medicine, The Patient Will See You Now, Deep Medicine: How Artificial Intelligence Can Make Healthcare Human Again, and Super Agers: An Evidence-Based Approach to Longevity. The through-line is a bet that technology will decentralize care and return power to patients - if the profession allows it.