How I Learned to Prescribe Motivation to my Patients | Vivek Natarajan | TEDxBoston

NOTE FROM TED: Technologies discussed in this talk remain experimental and are not intended to be a substitute for medical or diagnostic advice. This talk only represents the speaker's personal views and interpretation of generative AI, disease, and medical research which remains an ongoing field of study. TEDx events are independently organized by volunteers. The guidelines we give TEDx organizers are described in more detail here: http://storage.ted.com/tedx/manuals/t...

What if we could build a time machine, not to change the past, but to accelerate the future of medicine? Fueled by a deeply personal story of his family's battle with Parkinson's, Vivek Natarajan, researcher at Google DeepMind, unveils a bold mission to use AI to solve our greatest health challenges. In this powerful talk, he introduces two groundbreaking creations: an AI co-scientist that compresses decades of medical research into days, already helping scientists identify new drug candidates for cancer and reverse conditions like liver fibrosis; and an AI co-physician designed to democratize medical expertise, delivering world-class care with superhuman accuracy and empathy to anyone, anywhere. This is a profound glimpse into a near future where we can extend not only our lifespan but our healthspan, bringing the once-unthinkable goal of delivering world-class healthcare scalably and curing all diseases within our reach. Vivek Natarajan is a Research Scientist at Google DeepMind leading research at the intersection of AI, science and medicine.

He is the lead researcher behind Med-PaLM (Nature, 2023) and Med-PaLM 2 (Nature Medicine, 2025), the first AI systems to obtain passing and expert level scores on US Medical License exam questions, respectively.

Vivek also co-leads Project AMIE, a research program aiming to democratize medical expertise. Over the past year, AMIE has shown promising potential in controlled settings, including primary care, specialty care, and complex diagnostic challenges, as both a standalone (Nature, 2025) and assistive tool for clinicians (Nature 2025).

Finally, Vivek recently co-led the development of the AI co-scientist - a virtual AI collaborator designed to augment scientists, help uncover new original knowledge and accelerate the clock speed of scientific discoveries. The AI co-scientist has helped identify new repurposing drugs for cancer. With it, researchers at Stanford have identified new drug targets for reversing liver damage and it has even helped design more efficient proteins for cellular rejuvenation.

Prior to Google, Vivek worked on multimodal assistant systems at Facebook AI Research. He is also part of the faculty for executive education at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health in a part-time capacity. This talk was given at a TEDx event using the TED conference format but independently organized by a local community. Learn more at https://www.ted.com/tedx