My journey into medicine started when I lost my grandpa to cancer. I remember him dropping me off at my sixth-grade classroom in the morning, and by the time I got home, he was gone. I bought an oncology textbook not long after that. Science had always been my favorite subject, and I thought it could help me find some answers.

Years later, I was the doctor in the exam room, but I was still looking. The hospital where I worked was a national referral center for pediatric rare diseases, 95% of which have no cure. Every day, I was reminded how little medicine could explain about my patients’ conditions: the cellular dysfunction we could not see and the symptoms we could not explain.

Each of us has felt some version of that grief and frustration. People we love are misdiagnosed. We’re prescribed drugs that don’t work. It’s hard even to know how to talk about diseases like Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s, where the science has been stuck for decades and hope seems so far from reach.

But I also believe all of this can change—not 50 years from now, but far sooner—if the scientific community works urgently and collectively to realize the promise of AI in human health.

We can already see glimmers of what’s possible. To take just one example, scientists have built frontier AI models that can generate entirely new kinds of proteins to target cancer cells and stop pathogens. The models work because they’ve been trained on huge volumes of data and developed a deep understanding of how proteins fold and function in the body. The........

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