The Millennium Problems for Biology: A Concrete Challenge List

FutureHouse and Edison Scientific published a list of nine biology challenges, each with hard acceptance criteria. One asks for unassisted emergence of self-replicating RNA- and protein-based cells from a plausible primordial soup, requiring a 10⁶-fold abundance increase and indefinite division. Another demands whole-body cryopreservation of adult wild-type mice for 24 hours with >99% viability and no permanent organ damage. A third calls for a reverse translatase that reads arbitrary peptides and synthesizes a nucleic acid strand, hitting ≥90% sequence accuracy and an average read length of at least 25 residues. Other challenges include a Rubisco enzyme beating the natural Pareto frontier, a living cell using quadruplet codons, somatic limb regeneration in adult mice, bacterial production of AAV and lentivirus gene therapies, on-demand programmable proteases against 20 preregistered sites, and zero-shot cell-penetrating protein binders for intracellular targets. The post does not disclose prize amounts, deadlines, or judging procedures.