Artificial intelligence is often hailed as a great catalyst of medical innovation, a way to find cures to diseases that have confounded doctors and make health care more efficient, personalized, and accessible. But what if it turns out to be poison? Jonathan Zittrain, a Harvard Law School professor, posed that question during a conference in Boston Tuesday that examined the use of AI to accelerate the delivery of precision medicine to the masses. "I think of machine learning kind of as asbestos," he said. "It turns out that it's all over the place, even though at no point did you explicitly install it, and it has possibly some latent bad effects that you might regret later, after it's already too hard to get it all out."

U.K. Prime Minister Theresa May recently unveiled a "new weapon" in cancer research: artificial intelligence (AI). She and medical experts say AI could prevent 22,000 cancer deaths a year by 2033. Pooled together and cross-referenced with national data, patients' medical records, lifestyle habits, and genetic information would be used to help the computer algorithms spot cancer earlier. "Late diagnosis of otherwise treatable illnesses is one of the biggest causes of avoidable deaths. And the development of smart technologies to analyze great quantities of data quickly and with a higher degree of accuracy than is possible by human beings opens up a whole new field of medical research."

Humans cannot see, smell or taste airborne asbestos fibers. Identifying them through a microscope requires the eye of a trained analyst -- but perhaps not for long. Australian engineer Jordan Gruber is working on technology that can automatically detect asbestos from the air around a worksite. Exposure to airborne asbestos fibers is the primary cause of mesothelioma, an aggressive form of cancer. The past use of asbestos in building materials has led to great suffering among Americans and Australians alike.

Amid the Republican backlash against federal scientists who write rules governing everything from movie theater popcorn to offshore oil drilling, stories abound of overburdened businesses, heavy-handed civil servants and crushing paperwork. But another story, one involving a deadly household material, offers a lesson in what can go wrong when government experts are shackled, as currently envisioned under a sweeping regulatory reform bill gliding toward President Trump's desk. The GOP-backed legislation revives many of the rule-making hurdles that for years crippled the government's ability to respond to the asbestos-exposure epidemic, which has been blamed for tens of thousands of American deaths. "I don't think lawmakers are focusing on how extreme this legislation is," said Paul Billings, lobbyist for the American Lung Assn., which has joined several major public health groups imploring congressional leaders to apply the brakes. "It has been viewed as this abstraction that creates improvements in the regulatory process. This would undermine bedrock public health laws."