FutureHouse Publishes 'Millennium Problems for Biology' as the Ultimate Eval for AI in Bio
burny_tech · x · 2026-09-21
Edison Scientific and FutureHouse have released the "Millennium Problems for Biology," a set of hard-but-easily-validated challenges framed as the "last reasonable eval" for AI in biology.
Selection criteria:
- Easy validation: every problem must be verifiable in a standard wet lab within days to a couple of weeks, so challenges like "solve aging" are excluded.
- Objective grading: mysteries where it's hard to tell when they're "solved" (e.g., the Vault protein's function, the Oxytricha genome) are omitted.
- Accessibility: problems must be understandable to anyone with basic biology training.
Sample problems:
- Origins of life: demonstrate unassisted emergence of self-replicating RNA/protein-based cells from a plausible primordial soup, growing at least 10⁶-fold (20 generations), capable of indefinite division, with clear heritable information encoding.
- Cryopreservation: reversibly vitrify whole adult wild-type mice for 24+ hours and recover them with >99% viability and no permanent organ damage.
The authors expect some problems may be revised based on community feedback; full acceptance criteria are published online.
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