Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America

And every time one of those claims came stamped with a number and a prestigious name, everybody gave it a lot of credence.

In 2020, a NOAA scientist named James Cosson published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences his warning that warming was raising the odds of a storm reaching major hurricane strength by about 8% every decade.

Last November.

a group called the World Weather Attribution Group.

That's the textbook version.

And a 2024 radiocarbon study in PNAS complicates it hard.

This is the one with the 100 plus dates.

Over 100 radiocarbon dates from four excavation areas in the city of David.

From Discover Wildlife, August 2024.

From the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Volume 103, Number 17.

From Physics and Chemistry of the Earth, Parts ABC, Volume 140.

And from Wikipedia.

It was a joint study from John Hopkins and MIT.

And it was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

And it was really this interesting kind of study that I'll get into a little bit more of the details about here in just a moment.

But the idea was about AI and personality.

A better clock for ancient DNA.

The primary study, a refined phylogenology of the second plague pandemic in western Eurasia, has been published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The main tool of that study, called phylogenetically informed radiocarbon modeling, or PHIRM, uses the radiocarbon range combined with the position of a genome on Y. pestis's evolutionary tree, narrowing dates that can otherwise span more than a century.

This improvement in accuracy is a game-changer because it lets genetic evidence be compared with specific named outbreaks in chronicles and local records.

This is going to confer a lot of benefits to nerve repair.

Basically, there was a 2004 PNAS paper identifying the heterodimer as the foundation of everything that follows.

Separate 2004 paper showed chemically modified EPO kept tissue protection while losing the red cell effect.

And together, they proved the two jobs could be separated at the molecular level.

It means a legitimate fear can be exploited.

A 2025 PNAS study, Hose and Gilardi, N10800, Three Pre-Registered Experiments, tested the distraction hypothesis that existential risk narratives crowd out public attention to AI's real immediate harms, bias, labor displacement, and so on.

They found the opposite of what you'd expect if the fear were a pure smokescreen.

Existential framing increased catastrophic risk concern without reducing concern about immediate harms.

As AI tools become deeply embedded in healthcare, recent reports like the JAMA Summit Report on AI, which came out in October of 2025, highlight our urgent need for stronger systems in evaluation, monitoring, governance, infrastructure, and incentives.

At the same time, there are real-world risks, like a London School of Economics analysis showing a GEMA-generated summary in social care may downplay women's health needs, and research in PNAS warning that large language models often misestimate well-being in underrepresented contexts.

Today, we'll dive deep into these challenges, what it takes to become an AI literate clinician, how we should rethink medical training, the incentive shaping health system choices, and the practical tools and guardrails needed to ensure AI delivers real benefit without unintended harms.

Welcome, Dr. James.