No one knows the answer, and that's the point - Harvard Gazette

"The brainchild of Dean of Science Jeff Lichtman, "Genuinely Hard Problems in Science" explores mysteries of the natural world that have stubbornly resisted the best efforts to crack them. How did life emerge from non-biological matter? How did single cells evolve into complex life? What mechanisms drive the aging process - and can they be reversed? What is the relationship between brain anatomy and mental illness?"

""Genuinely Hard Problems," or GHP as it's become known in the division, seeks to pilot a new approach to a scientific landscape that has been reshaped by technology. Traditional scientific education is designed to develop expertise in one discipline. But today anybody with a smartphone can instantly retrieve vast amounts of scientific information. Artificial Intelligence performs some tasks with speed and accuracy no human can match."

A pilot course enrolls 15 first-year students to confront long-standing, unresolved scientific mysteries without predetermined answers. The course targets questions such as the origin of life, evolution of multicellularity, mechanisms of aging, and links between brain anatomy and mental illness. The pedagogy rejects deference to authority and prioritizes creative, out-of-the-box thinking over rote disciplinary conformity. The program aims to transform science by training small cohorts to explore unconventional pathways. The initiative responds to a changing technological landscape in which smartphones and artificial intelligence alter the value of narrow expertise and enable rapid access to specific tasks and information.

Read at Harvard Gazette