Eric Topol

The U.S. government has been preoccupied with health care 'reform,' but this refers to improving access and insurance coverage and has little or nothing to do with innovation.

Of course, the medical profession doesn't like D.I.Y. anything.

We're all essentially surgically connected to our smartphones, and we're still in the early stages of realizing their medical potential. But they should be a real threat to the medical profession.

Chemotherapy is just medieval. It's such a blunt instrument. We're going to look back on it like we do the dark ages.

The digital world has been in a separate orbit from our medical cocoon, and it's time the boundaries be taken down.

There are certain mutations you can find across cancers in different organs.

About half of all people don't take medications like they're supposed to.

If you sequence a cancerous tumor, you should be able to tailor the therapy according to the root cause of the cancer. But it has taken so long to do the sequencing - which also requires time to prepare the samples and interpret the deluge of data that comes out - that the patients are already undergoing therapy by the process if over.

For diabetes in particular, we know there's a relationship between lack of glucose regulation and complications like blindness and kidney failure. So if you were diabetic and you knew that you could get your glucose in a tight, normal range just by adjusting your lifestyle, wouldn't that be great?

I love information. I can never get enough. I get bored easily.

There are estimates that 2 to 3 percent of cancers in the U.S. each year are engendered by exposure to repetitive imaging.

I have had my genome fully sequenced and have learned a great deal about which medications I would respond to and which might or would induce major side effects, along with knowing many medical conditions for which I'm particularly susceptible.