Millennium Problems for Biology

[Braganca]

In light of the progress in mathematics, we at Edison Scientific and FutureHouse have assembled a set of Millennium Problems for Biology. They are chosen to be very hard to solve but very easy to… | Samuel G. Rodriques | 24 comments

In light of the progress in mathematics, we at Edison Scientific and FutureHouse have assembled 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...

www.linkedin.com

“In light of the progress in mathematics, we at Edison Scientific and FutureHouse have assembled 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. This was work primarily by Michaela Hinks and myself, with contributions from many others. Short descriptions below. The full descriptions of the problems with acceptance criteria are at millenniumproblems.bio. Share more if you have ideas. If they meet our criteria, we’ll add them to our list (with attribution and permission).

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. Finally, we anticipate that some problems may require edits in response to community feedback. If you think we got them wrong, please send the feedback, and we will collate and update.”

 

[Braganca]

Are there any questions that could be added that would be relevant to MECFS?

 

[Jonathan Edwards]

Those problems look like day dreaming. There are some much more realistic and interesting problems worth focusing on. How do anaesthetics work? is a good one.

 

[dilieil]

Those problems look like day dreaming. There are some much more realistic and interesting problems worth focusing on. How do anaesthetics work? is a good one.

What do you mean by day dreaming? That they are too difficult and are very unlikely to be solved? Or something else?

 

[Jonathan Edwards]

That they are too difficult and are very unlikely to be solved?

Some yes. Some seem to be technical challenges that a biotechnologist might think were interesting but which are unlikely to be for anyone wanting to improve the human lot.