Top 25 Questions for Scientists

Science magazine has a very interesting series that they have launched in which they address the top 125 questions that have not yet been satisfactorily answered. I find much of this to be absolutely fascinating. Here I'll share with you a few snippets:

What We Don't Know
Donald Kennedy and Colin Norman

At Science, we tend to get excited about new discoveries that lift the veil a little on how things work, from cells to the universe. That puts our focus firmly on what has been added to our stock of knowledge. For this anniversary issue, we decided to shift our frame of reference, to look instead at what we don't know: the scientific puzzles that are driving basic scientific research.

We began by asking Science's Senior Editorial Board, our Board of Reviewing Editors, and our own editors and writers to suggest questions that point to critical knowledge gaps. The ground rules: Scientists should have a good shot at answering the questions over the next 25 years, or they should at least know how to go about answering them. We intended simply to choose 25 of these suggestions and turn them into a survey of the big questions facing science. But when a group of editors and writers sat down to select those big questions, we quickly realized that 25 simply wouldn't convey the grand sweep of cutting-edge research that lies behind the responses we received. So we have ended up with 125 questions, a fitting number for Science's 125th anniversary.

First, a note on what this special issue is not: It is not a survey of the big societal challenges that science can help solve, nor is it a forecast of what science might achieve. Think of it instead as a survey of our scientific ignorance, a broad swath of questions that scientists themselves are asking. As Tom Siegfried puts it in his introductory essay, they are "opportunities to be exploited."

We selected 25 of the 125 questions to highlight based on several criteria: how fundamental they are, how broad-ranging, and whether their solutions will impact other scientific disciplines. Some have few immediate practical implications--the composition of the universe, for example. Others we chose because the answers will have enormous societal impact--whether an effective HIV vaccine is feasible, or how much the carbon dioxide we are pumping into the atmosphere will warm our planet, for example. Some, such as the nature of dark energy, have come to prominence only recently; others, such as the mechanism behind limb regeneration in amphibians, have intrigued scientists for more than a century. We listed the 25 highlighted questions in no special order, but we did group the 100 additional questions roughly by discipline."

And here is a list of the top 25 questions:

THE QUESTIONS
The Top 25
Essays by our news staff on 25 big questions facing science over the next quarter-century.

>	What Is the Universe Made Of?
>	What is the Biological Basis of Consciousness?
>	Why Do Humans Have So Few Genes?
>	To What Extent Are Genetic Variation and Personal Health Linked?
>	Can the Laws of Physics Be Unified?
>	How Much Can Human Life Span Be Extended?
>	What Controls Organ Regeneration?
>	How Can a Skin Cell Become a Nerve Cell?
>	How Does a Single Somatic Cell Become a Whole Plant?
>	How Does Earth's Interior Work?
>	Are We Alone in the Universe?
>	How and Where Did Life on Earth Arise?
>	What Determines Species Diversity?
>	What Genetic Changes Made Us Uniquely Human?
>	How Are Memories Stored and Retrieved?
>	How Did Cooperative Behavior Evolve?
>	How Will Big Pictures Emerge from a Sea of Biological Data?
>	How Far Can We Push Chemical Self-Assembly?
>	What Are the Limits of Conventional Computing?
>	Can We Selectively Shut Off Immune Responses?
>	Do Deeper Principles Underlie Quantum Uncertainty and Nonlocality?
>	Is an Effective HIV Vaccine Feasible?
>	How Hot Will the Greenhouse World Be?
>	What Can Replace Cheap Oil -- and When?
>	Will Malthus Continue to Be Wrong?

I haven't read all of this yet, but so far I have found most of it to be interesting.