Charlie Munger explained why AI will solve diseases faster than anything in human history. He did it two weeks before he died, at 99. In 1954, his eight-year-old son Teddy was diagnosed with leukemia. There was no treatment. The survival rate for childhood leukemia in the 1950s was close... to zero. Munger was 31, freshly divorced, nearly broke. His friend Rick Guerin said Munger would go to the hospital, hold Teddy, then walk the streets of Pasadena alone, crying. Teddy died in 1955 at the age of 9. A reporter asks how he got through it. He says, "You can't bring back the dead. You can't cure the dying child. You have to soldier through. If you have to walk through the streets crying for a few hours a day, it's part of soldiering. You go ahead and cry away. But you can't quit." Then he says, "In those days, the fatality rate with childhood leukemia was 100%. That's gone away. Now the cure rate is way up in the 90s." He's right. The five-year survival rate for the most common childhood leukemia (called ALL, acute lymphoblastic leukemia) was close to zero before 1950. By the 1960s, it was under 15%. Today, it's about 90%, according to the American Cancer Society. It took 70 years of researchers running clinical trials and developing combination drug therapies to get there. That was without AI. Human researchers work on one hypothesis at a time. There are now over 170 AI-discovered drug programs in clinical trials. AI is compressing early drug discovery timelines by 30 to 40%, turning what used to take three to four years of preclinical work into 12 to 18 months. No AI-discovered drug has yet received FDA approval, but the first is expected in 2026 or 2027. The pipeline is real and growing fast. What took seven decades for leukemia, AI could compress into years for diseases we haven't cracked yet. Munger said it plainly: "What mankind did, what civilization did, was soldier through those tough years that took away my cousin Tommy from meningitis, and then took away my son Teddy from leukemia. Imagine pretty well fixing that disease for families who came into life later. It's a huge achievement." He lost his son 68 years before this interview. He watched civilization solve the thing that took his boy. He died two weeks later, at 99. AI is about to make civilization progress much faster.show more

Anish Moonka

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