Edison Scientific and FutureHouse Announce 12 Millennium Problems for Biology
The Millennium Problems for Biology
Edison Scientific and FutureHouse have unveiled a list of 12 grand challenges for biology, inspired by the Millennium Prize Problems. The problems include creating life from chemical precursors, cryopreserving and reviving mice, building enzymes that reverse translate peptides, and engineering cells with quadruplet codons. Each problem has strict success criteria, such as achieving 10⁶-fold cell growth or >99% viability after cryopreservation. The list aims to drive breakthroughs in synthetic biology and biotechnology.
Demonstrate the emergence of life from chemical precursors in a laboratory setting. Specifically, demonstrate the unassisted emergence of self replicating RNA- and protein-based cells from a plausible primordial soup with a plausible energy source.
- doctoboggan
Someone should make the millennium problems for AI alignment so the frontier labs will actually try to solve that problem.
- pfisherman
Biology already has numerous “Millennium Problems” and the rewards are much more than $1M. For example, reverse Alzheimer’s Disease. Or less ambitious develop high fidelity in vitro and animal models of human disease.
- daoboy
This is all well outside my area of expertise, but my impression is that Michael Levin's work with bioelectricity is on the cusp of #6 Somatic limb regeneration.
SMEs please correct the record if I'm mistaken.
- ferd
Is inner-ear cell regeneration included in #06?
- PaulKeeble
Its much harder to produce a good fundamental list of biology problems because we are no where near as far along, so many basic things are not understood. There are still many unknown unknowns and these particular problems are limited to the realm of verifiable in a lab, which rules out much of what makes biology interesting and hard to study, and that is the organisms themselves and the interactions between their cells. The petri dish differs from the rat differs from the human and that is a part of what makes biology harder to progress.
None of these is likely the root to the wide array of chronic illnesses we can't treat and those seem like the next step to really put a lot of research into given how many people suffer from them and where we are today they seem achievable with the right investment.
- unknown-unknown
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lists_of_problems
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_unsolved_problems_in_b...
- rdtsc
> Demonstrate the emergence of life from chemical precursors in a laboratory setting
Wait, isn’t this an already solved problem? I remember in the 90s school books (material written in the 80s-70s likely) it was presented as “so and so did electric discharges in an atmospheric gas mixtures and they got organic molecules” therefore the origins of life is solved. I remember thinking how cool that was. I guess the “therefore” step was sort of a lie if it’s still an open problem…
- bonsai_spool
This is a collection of pet projects by folks who are not distinguished biologists. Interesting, maybe, but not to be placed on the same pedestal as the mathematics Millenium Prize of a similar name.
Arguably, the origin of life is a question for all time -- no way that a VC webpage is going to change whether someone takes that problem on, and it will be commercialized with big-name capitalists instead of 'FutureHouse' should it ever be developed in the lab.