World Solve

Emerging gene therapies show promise but remain extremely expensive and inaccessible to the vast majority of people living with sickle cell disease worldwide, especially in Africa where it's most common. Making a real cure affordable and available remains unsolved.

Conditions like long COVID and chronic Lyme disease affect some patients severely while others recover fully from the same initial infection. Understanding this difference could unlock treatments for currently unexplained chronic illness.

Antibiotics are widely used in livestock farming to prevent disease and promote growth, contributing significantly to antibiotic resistance in humans. Reducing this use without harming farmers' livelihoods remains a persistent unresolved challenge.

Air pollution contributes to respiratory and cardiovascular disease in millions of people living in polluted urban areas, and treatment only addresses symptoms, not exposure. Reducing the exposure itself remains the harder, unresolved half of the problem.

As gene editing technology advances, the line between preventing disease and choosing traits like appearance or intelligence becomes ethically blurry. Society hasn't agreed on where, if anywhere, that line should be firmly drawn.

Because rare diseases affect few patients, there's often little financial incentive for researchers or companies to develop treatments. Thousands of rare conditions remain effectively untreated as a direct result.

Personalized medicine is improving, but doctors still can't always predict in advance which patients will respond to a given treatment. Solving this could avoid painful trial-and-error treatment periods for patients.

Existing dementia treatments offer only modest, temporary relief from symptoms rather than meaningfully slowing the underlying disease. A real disease-modifying treatment remains one of medicine's most sought-after breakthroughs.

A small number of people show natural resistance to certain infections or conditions, and understanding why could reveal entirely new treatment approaches. This resistance remains only partially understood at a genetic level.

Unlike infectious diseases, cancer arises from a person's own cells mutating, making a universal vaccine far more complex to design. Progress exists for a few cancer types, but a broadly effective approach remains unsolved.

Bees and other pollinators face combined pressure from pesticides, habitat loss, and disease, and addressing just one threat rarely solves the overall decline. A comprehensive solution addressing all major threats together remains unbuilt.

Enhancing traits like intelligence or appearance raises questions about consent, since the child never agreed to the modification, alongside broader worries about fairness and inequality. This unresolved debate will only grow more urgent as genetic technology advances.

Wild animals experience enormous suffering from disease, starvation, and predation, and it's unclear whether humans have any duty to intervene, given the massive scale and complexity involved. This unresolved question is a growing but underexplored area of ethics.

A fungal disease combined with habitat destruction has driven sharp declines in amphibian populations across many regions, and effective large-scale intervention remains limited. Protecting these ecologically important species remains an unresolved conservation priority.

Colony collapse disorder continues to threaten commercial and wild bee populations that are essential for pollinating much of the global food supply. A comprehensive solution addressing all contributing factors at once remains unresolved.

As temperatures rise, mosquitoes and other disease-carrying insects are expanding into regions that were previously too cold for them to survive, introducing new health and ecological risks. Tracking and responding to this shift remains an unresolved public health and conservation challenge.

Vultures help prevent disease spread by consuming carcasses quickly, but populations have declined sharply in various regions due to poisoning and habitat loss. Protecting this often-overlooked but ecologically important species remains an unresolved conservation issue.

Escaped farmed fish can compete with, interbreed with, or spread disease to native wild fish populations, threatening genetic diversity and long-term population health. Preventing these escapes and their ecological impact remains an unresolved aquaculture industry challenge.

Gene editing could prevent serious diseases, but it also opens the door to selecting traits that have nothing to do with health. Society hasn't agreed on where prevention ends and something more troubling begins.

Wealthier countries can screen for many rare genetic conditions at birth, but most of the world's newborns are never tested. Expanding this access could catch treatable conditions before irreversible damage occurs.