The Millennium Problems for Biology

In light of the advances in mathematics, Michaela Hinks and I have put together a set of Millennium Problems for Biology. They are chosen to be very hard to solve but very easy to validate in a simple laboratory environment. Any of these, if solved, would mark a major advance in biotechnology, and most of them would contribute materially towards curing disease. These are, in some sense, the “last reasonable eval” for AI in biology.

They are at the following website. If you think any of the problems need to be revised, please let us know:

millenniumproblems.bio

A few notes on exclusion/inclusion criteria:

• We placed a major emphasis on ease of validation, so challenges like “solve aging” are omitted. These should all be validatable in a standard wet lab in a short period of time (days, maybe a week or two.)
  

• We placed a major emphasis on ensuring grading would be as objective as possible, so many great basic science mysteries are also omitted, because it would be very challenging to tell when the mystery was “solved.” (E.g., “uncover the function of the Vault protein,” or “explain how the Oxytricha genome works.”)

  
  

• We placed a major emphasis on ensuring the problems would be understandable to anyone with a basic biology background, so some highly technical but very important challenges were also omitted.

Thanks to Adam Marblestone, Michael Baym, Erika DeBenedictis, and Tony Kulesa for reviews.