Drawing inspiration from the Millennium Prize Problems in mathematics, Edison Scientific and FutureHouse have assembled a set of Millennium Problems for Biology. Each problem is intended to be very difficult to solve, but easy to validate in a simple laboratory environment. For this reason, grand challenges like “Solve Aging” that are very important and challenging but very hard to validate are excluded. Solving any one of these problems would represent a major advance in biology or biotechnology, and most of them would contribute materially towards curing disease. These are, in some sense, the “last reasonable eval” for AI in biology.
The initial list of 12 problems was developed by Sam Rodriques and Michaela Hinks, with feedback from the FutureHouse and Edison Scientific teams. You can read more about each on the Millennium Problems for Biology webpage.
- Origins of life
- Cryopreservation
- The reverse translatase
- Improve Rubisco
- The quadruplet cell
- Somatic limb regeneration
- Bacterial production of gene therapies
- Programmable proteases
- Cell-penetrating protein binders
- Protein amplification chain reaction
- 5' polymerases
- New nitrogenases
This is a living project maintained by the FutureHouse team and may be refined or expanded as science advances. We welcome your input – submit your comments on the current list of problems or propose new ones through our submission form.
Stay tuned for further updates in the coming months as we iterate on the initial set.
Questions can be directed to millenniumproblems@futurehouse.org.
