Why the Hype About AI Curing Disease Isn’t as Crazy as It Sounds

AI headlines make bold claims — curing all diseases in a decade, accelerating medical breakthroughs, even slowing aging. Are these promises pure hype, or is something real changing beneath the surface?

In this episode of aiGED, Ginny Deerin takes a clear, non-technical look at why the excitement around AI and medicine isn’t as far-fetched as it may sound. Rather than surveying AI in healthcare broadly, she focuses on one pivotal scientific breakthrough — AlphaFold — to explain how AI has dramatically expanded what scientists can see and understand about biology.

Ginny walks listeners through why protein shape matters, how AI moved science from understanding less than 1% of known protein structures to nearly all of them, and why this kind of shift represents a change in what’s possible — not just a faster version of the old way of doing things.

The episode also explores why medical progress still requires time, testing, and regulation, even as AI accelerates discovery.

Thoughtful, grounded, and designed especially for the 65+ audience, this episode helps make sense of the hype — and the reality — behind AI’s growing role in science and medicine.

SHOW NOTES

AlphaFold

AI in the News

• Recent article by Jasmine Sun, published on January 3rd in The New York Times, titled “Chinese Peptides Are the Latest Biohacking Trend in the Tech World.” The subtitle says it all: “The gray-market drugs flooding Silicon Valley reveal a community that believes it can move faster than the F.D.A.”
• “What AI Won’t Replace: The 2026 Growth Edition - The Jobs & Skills That Are Actually Growing (While Others Disappear)” by Rohan Mistry in The Medium.

aiGED: AI for the 65+ crowd