The Millennium Problems for Biology

freebsd_lovefes

It's missing some important stuff? Like creating bacteria that can produce fuels or break down plastics.

thehamkercat

> 02 - Cryopreservation Demonstrate the ability to cryopreserve and recover live wild-type mice with high viability. > 06 - Somatic limb regeneration Demonstrate the ability to regenerate lost limbs in adult wild-type mice. Interesting, but looks like these problems are proposed in September 2026, unlike original 7 Millennium Prize Problems of Maths

yewenjie

Who is this by? Who verifies the result? Is there prize money?

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.

himinlomax

It's missing an obvious one: morphogenesis.

Q6T46nT668w6i3m

It’s strange they are all engineering problems.

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.

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.

shevy-java

> 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. A “cell” may be any compartment with a defined boundary. So, right now, nobody can explain how life originated. Proving that aminoacids, DNA or RNA form, does NOT mean that this is equal to life. This is a problem that the whole field has - it still can not explain how life originated. Showing that individual components can arise spontaneously, is not the same as showing e. g. how a cell formed and so forth. Where does the encoding problem fit into any of that, for instance? You need to prove how you can assemble systems. Just having a working ribosome does not connect it to DNA as a genetic backup system; and RNA tends to be unstable. Even when you have assumptions how this works together, you need to prove that this is how things originate(d). Nobody has done so since decades. It is an unsolved problem.

alabhyajindal

So anyone can create a list of problems and slap the name Millennium Problems on them?

hn3ufz62f7

Agreeing on the model gap, the bit left out is that even human-to-human it breaks. Same drug, same dose, wildly different response depending on genotype and gut flora.

Mistletoe

I’m going to be honest, I don’t know if improving Rubsico is possible. Nature has had every reason to and billions of years. It’s optimized as far as it can go and you either lose speed or specificity, I don’t think having both is possible.

ak_111

Not an expert, but as I understand from my colleagues you can make a case for lots of really important problems related to protein folding to be included in the list. As protein folding hasn't been nearly "solved" by alphafold as has been reported in many places.

cupantae

Slap an LLM on those and call it a day

doctoboggan

Someone should make the millennium problems for AI alignment so the frontier labs will actually try to solve that problem.

sajithdilshan

Do we really have to solve these problems though? Why would anyone want to have an inferior bio limb when they can substitute it with a superior and easily repairable/upgradable mechanical limb? Granted that the artificial limbs we have right now are pretty basic, but wouldn’t it make sense to improve it rather than trying to grow new limbs? Also if you think humans would ever become a space faring species, would it really make sense to stick to our carbon based biology or should we invest in transforming into silicon based beings

dnautics

These are almost all so stupid. Written by people who clearly don't know their chemistry Reverse translatase and protein amplification in particular. How the fuck do you plan on selectively priming protein amplification. If you know ANY protein chemistry, you will know "the juice is not worth the squeeze" -- how would I exponentially amplify a protein? I'd do mass spec proteomics, synthesize the DNA, and express it. Simply amazing that electrofixation is not on the list.

monegator

is it yet another vibecoded website? akin to the poster discussion, all vibecoded websites do not need to look like the same, please put some care or taste in your prompts.

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.

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…