The Medical Matchmaking Machine

Radiolab

WNYC Studios

Science, Natural Sciences, History, Society & Culture, Documentary

4.6 • 43.5K Ratings

🗓️ 22 August 2025

⏱️ 62 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

As he finished his medical school exam, David Fajgenbaum felt off. He walked down to the ER and checked himself in. Soon he was in the ICU with multiple organ failure. The only drug for his condition didn’t work. He had months to live, if that. If he was going to survive, he was going to have to find his own cure. Miraculously, he pulled it off in the nick of time. From that ordeal, he realized that our system of discovering and approving drugs is far from perfect, and that he might be able to use AI to find dozens, hundreds, even thousands of cures, hidden in plain sight, for as-yet untreatable diseases. EPISODE CREDITS:Reported by - Latif NasserProduced by - Maria Paz Gutiérrezwith mixing help from - Jeremy S. BloomFact-checking by - Natalie A. MiddletonVISIT:Everycure.org (https://www.everycure.org)EPISODE CITATIONS:Books -Blair Bigham - Death Interrupted: How Modern Medicine is Complicating the Way We Die David Fajgenbaum - Chasing My Cure, (https://davidfajgenbaum.com/) Radiolab | Lateral Cuts:Check out Death Interrupted (https://radiolab.org/podcast/death-interrupted), a conversation with Blair Bigham about a worldview shifting change of heart.The Dirty Drug and the Ice Cream Tub (https://radiolab.org/podcast/dirty-drug-and-ice-cream-tub) to hear the crazy story about how Rapamycin was discovered. Signup for our newsletter!! It includes short essays, recommendations, and details about other ways to interact with the show. Sign up (https://radiolab.org/newsletter)! Radiolab is supported by listeners like you. Support Radiolab by becoming a member of The Lab (https://members.radiolab.org/) today. Follow our show on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook @radiolab, and share your thoughts with us by emailing [email protected] support for Radiolab’s science programming is provided by the Simons Foundation and the John Templeton Foundation. Foundational support for Radiolab was provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Wait, you're listening.
0:03.1	Okay.
0:04.4	All right.
0:05.7	Okay.
0:07.0	All right.
0:08.5	You're listening to Radio Lab.
0:11.4	Radio Lab.
0:11.9	From W. N. Y.
0:13.9	C.
0:14.3	See?
0:14.9	Yeah.
0:19.7	Hey.
0:20.2	I'm Latif Nassar. This is Radio Lab. And today I want to share a conversation that I had with a guy named David Faganbaum. He's a doctor and a professor at the University of Pennsylvania. And there's a combination of reasons why I think his personal story is so extraordinary and why I wanted to share
0:39.4	with you. Part of it is this staggering series of crises that he faced in his personal life
0:48.2	starting when he was in university. Part of it is kind of his personality, like how he, what there was in him that made him
0:59.4	stand up to these crises in a really particular way. And then part of it is the way that he,
1:05.5	he took his response to those crises and now he's scaling it up using one of the most controversial technologies around
1:12.6	AI. The result of all of this is that he is right now in the middle of doing something
1:20.1	wildly ambitious, something I find kind of miraculous, also maybe troubling.
1:29.9	Either way, it is definitely going to change the medical system down to the level of the pills that you put in your mouth.
1:38.4	That said, I just found my conversation with David so fascinating.
1:41.3	And his personal backstory in general, I found it so dramatic that I wanted to let it unfold at its own pace without jumping too quickly to the end.
	...

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