About

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 was developed by Sam Rodriques and Michaela Hinks, with feedback from the FutureHouse and Edison Scientific teams. It is maintained as a living project by the FutureHouse team and may be refined or expanded as science advances. We welcome comments on the existing problems and proposals for new ones through the form on the comments page.

Questions can be directed to millenniumproblems@futurehouse.org.