Medicine in 2055.

Abstract

Good morning, and thank you all for being here today. It’s a true honor to address this esteemed group and to follow in the footsteps of so many outstanding leaders in academic medicine who have delivered this address over the past 130 years. Before I begin, I wanted to note how privileged I have felt over the years to work with so many outstanding people in our field. I sometimes worry we lose sight of the talent and commitment of those around us. There are few, if any, other fields that we would be surrounded by those whose lives are committed to improving the lives of the world around us and are willing to work countless hours to achieve this goal. In planning today’s talk, I took some time to listen to past AAP presidential speeches and found them informative and refreshingly varied. The talks that I found most engrossing were those that took a somewhat narrow theme — the practice of humanistic medicine or communicating about science to the public — and really delved into the nuances of the issue with telling data points and smart insights. Well, today I am going to do the opposite of that. No, I don’t mean that the talk will be insight-free, although I can’t make any promises! Instead of carving out a focused, manageable theme, I’ve decided to tackle the “big picture.” The stated purpose of the AAP is “the advancement of scientific and practical medicine” (1). So I thought, why not assess “the advancement of scientific and practical medicine” — both in terms of how far we’ve come and where we may be going in the future. It seemed a tad ambitious to start at the very beginning of modern medicine, so instead, I’ll go back to the early days of my own career. I’ll start by touching on a few of the major triumphs I’ve had the pleasure of witnessing over the past 40 years of biomedical science — areas where discovery has revolutionized clinical practice. Then, I’ll spotlight some of the current advances being driven by academic medical centers around the country in our collective quest to eradicate disease and help people around the globe lead longer, healthier lives. Finally, I’ll look ahead to the next 10–20 years. Today’s scientists are making staggering progress in many disease areas, but I’m going to focus on just a handful of conditions that are being dramatically changed through new technologies, new discoveries, and emerging treatment options — areas where I truly believe we will be able to offer new hope for patients over the next decade or two. For this portion of the talk, I asked all of my department chairs at Johns Hopkins Medicine to weigh in, so the predictions reflect their views as well as my own. Finally, when it comes to the pursuit of cures, we are in the midst of an era of unprecedented opportunities in science, but we’re also butting up against unprecedented challenges in the environment for doing science. I’ll spend a little time addressing these barriers to innovation and what we can do to overcome them.