Solve Today's Greatest Scientific Challenge, Win £10 Million

Back in 1714, the British government launched a prize to solve what was then considered the greatest scientific challenge: measuring longitude.

Sailors could figure out latitude from the sun, but determining longitude evaded them, which made maritime ventures pretty treacherous. It’s hard to plan a safe route when you don’t know where you are. A prize of £20,000 (equivalent to around £2 million or $3.4 million in today’s money) was offered to anyone who could come up with a solution accurate to half a degree, which clockmaker John Harrison bagged with his "H4" marine chronometer.

Three hundred years on and the UK is back with a new competition, but the challenge to be solved hasn’t yet been decided. The government’s Technology Strategy Board and national innovation foundation Nesta today launched the Longitude Prize 2014 with the help of the BBC, whose Horizon show will ask the public to vote for which of six problems should represent the biggest scientific challenge of our time. The prize for anyone who can then solve that problem: a sweet £10 million ($16.8 million).

The competition is overseen by an impressive committee of leading scientists and technologists, who have already whittled down the challenges to a shortlist of six. According to them, these are some of the biggest challenges facing us right now:

The impending antibiotic-resistance crisis is already pretty bad, and with limited efforts to do anything about it, it’s only going to get worse. The prize won’t actually be to look for new antibiotics (though that’s something we should be doing anyway) but to address one of the major driving factors behind antibiotic-resistant superbugs: overuse.

The more we use antibiotics, the more chance we have of artificially selecting resistant strains, but we’re still taking them quite indiscriminately. The challenge, should this problem be picked, will therefore be to invent a “cheap, accurate, rapid, and easy-to-use test for bacterial infections.” The idea is that healthcare workers could then easily tell if you actually need antibiotics, and only prescribe them if you do.

With an estimated 135 million people expected to have dementia by 2050, it’s clearly a significant health problem, and one that we don’t really understand or have any real treatment for.

The committee won’t be looking for a cure for Alzheimer’s—that’s a bit of a big ask—but rather to develop technology that can help people live more independently with dementia. As with all the shortlisted issues, the exact details of the prize will be cemented once the final challenge is decided on, but I for one would hope to see some more friendly robots and cuddly seal toys.

While this one’s about flying in particular, it’s clearly more broadly targeting escalating emissions and their role in climate change. The prize acknowledges that we have seen the potential for zero-emission flight in the form of solar-powered planes, but points out that these haven’t had any impact so far on the mainstream aviation industry and its growing carbon footprint.

They’re focusing on commercial short-haul flights and will ask challengers to design and build a “zero or close-to-zero-carbon airplane that is capable of flying from London to Edinburgh, at comparable speed to today’s aircraft.”

Food resources are already running low in some regions, while in others our unhealthy eating habits are steering us toward an early death. This suggested research area pits the diet of the rich against the poor and asks for a solution to the problems of both.

The answer it’s looking for is also perhaps the vaguest so far; it’s asking for “the next big food innovation” that’s nutritious, affordable, sustainable, and scalable. An obvious answer is eating bugs, though that’s hardly a new idea. Maybe the solution could also take into account animal replacements like lab-grown meat or fake eggs. Or just Soylent for everyone, perhaps?

The challenge here is quite obvious: give people who have suffered paralysis the same level of movement healthy people have. The potential for innovation here, however, is very broad. We’ve already seen stem cell treatments, electrode implants, and of course the brain-machine interface that’s set to power the first kick of the World Cup.

That said, none of those have neared restoring movement back to normal, so there’s definitely a way to go to hit the jackpot.

Here's another pretty vital resource that’s scarce in many areas, despite being found in excess across the planet. As with food, the prize aims to bridge these extremes through desalination, so we can turn unusable ocean water into drinking water, or at least water good enough for agriculture.

In a way, this one has been solved—desalination plants exist—but the prize’s website explains that they’re very costly, not energy efficient, and often get contaminated, so we’re basically back at square one. They’re looking for a solution that’s cheap and sustainable.

One of the above will be selected on Thursday, when people in the UK can vote on which gets the bounty. It’s quite telling that, though they each represent specific problems, they all fall into at least one of two camps: health and climate change (though it's perhaps surprising there's nothing to do with energy here?). For me, there are certainly two that stand out above the others as the most globally significant, and it’ll be interesting to see what captures the public’s imagination.

After that, it’s up to budding inventors to crack on with their entries and submit them from September. Anyone can enter an idea, from professionals to citizen scientists, and the organisers aren’t expecting an immediate victor. They say that the prize will run “for five years, or until the prize is won.”

So if you happen to be sitting on some game-changing technology, it's time to crack out the blueprints.