Eric Topol, Founder and Director, Scripps Research Translational Institute

Eric Topol is a cardiologist and the founder and director of the Scripps Research Translational Institute in La Jolla, California. He previously chaired cardiovascular medicine at the Cleveland Clinic and founded its Lerner College of Medicine. He is known for large heart-attack trials, for challenging the safety of the pain drug Vioxx, and for books on what digital tools and medical AI can and cannot do for patients.

Degrees from the University of Virginia

He was born on June 26, 1954. He earned a bachelor's degree in biomedicine from the University of Virginia in 1975, with highest distinction, and a medical degree from the University of Rochester in 1979.

Leading Cardiology at Cleveland Clinic

He trained in internal medicine at the University of California, San Francisco, from 1979 to 1982, and in cardiology at Johns Hopkins from 1982 to 1985. During that fellowship he was involved with the first patient given recombinant t-PA, in 1984. t-PA, tissue plasminogen activator, is a drug that dissolves the clot blocking a coronary artery in a heart attack. He was a tenured professor at the University of Michigan from 1985 to 1991. At 36 he became chair of cardiovascular medicine at the Cleveland Clinic and held the job until 2006. U.S. News & World Report ranked that heart program first in the country for more than a decade of his tenure. In 2002 he founded the Cleveland Clinic Lerner College of Medicine. It was the first new U.S. medical school in about 20 years, and its first class entered in 2004. He was the college's provost and the clinic's chief academic officer.

In 2004 he wrote in The New York Times and in the New England Journal of Medicine that Merck's pain drug rofecoxib, sold as Vioxx, raised the risk of heart attack and that Merck and the FDA had failed the public. Merck withdrew Vioxx that year. Merck's chief executive complained to the Cleveland Clinic's board about his work. In late 2005 the clinic abolished the chief academic officer job and removed him as provost. The New York Times described the fight as a public dispute over the clinic's ties to drug and device makers. Scripps Health and Scripps Research recruited him in late 2006 to build a new institute for individualized medicine. That institute is now the Scripps Research Translational Institute. He is an executive vice president at Scripps Research and still sees patients in cardiology at Scripps Clinic.

He has published more than 1,300 peer-reviewed papers and was elected to the National Academy of Medicine in 2004. His books for a general reader are The Creative Destruction of Medicine (2012), The Patient Will See You Now (2015), Deep Medicine (2019), and Super Agers (2025). Deep Medicine is his argument that medical AI should give clinicians more time with patients, not replace the visit. He writes an open newsletter, Ground Truths, on new medical AI papers.

In 2018 Jeremy Hunt, then Britain's health secretary, asked him to review how the National Health Service workforce should use genomics, digital tools, and AI. The resulting Topol Review said many patients with long-term illness would, within about ten years, track themselves with wearables at home rather than only in occasional clinic visits.

In 2016 the National Institutes of Health awarded his group $207 million for the All of Us Research Program. The grant was renewed in 2023 for $282 million over five years. All of Us is the federal study that follows about a million Americans so researchers can tie care to a person's genes and life history.

Married to Susan Merriman Topol

He is married to Susan Merriman Topol. They have two children.

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