Edison Scientific Assembles Millennium Problems for Biology | Samuel G. Rodriques posted on the topic | LinkedIn
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. Thanks to Adam Marblestone, Michael Baym, Erika DeBenedictis, and Tony Kulesa for reviews. | 52 comments on LinkedIn
