Harvard's first-year scientists learn to live with unsolved problems

Fifteen first-year students at Harvard College walked into an unusual class a few weeks into the semester. There were no textbooks with answers in the back. No problem sets with solutions. Instead, they found chairs arranged for a conversation about questions that have resisted the world's best minds: How did life emerge from non-living matter? What drives aging, and can it be stopped? Why does brain anatomy sometimes fail to explain mental illness?

The class is called "Genuinely Hard Problems in Science," and it exists because Dean of Science Jeff Lichtman noticed something broken in how we teach science. We've built an entire system around expertise in narrow disciplines — but today, a smartphone can retrieve any fact instantly, and AI can outpace human calculation. The real bottleneck isn't knowledge anymore. It's the ability to think sideways.

"What we're trying to do," Lichtman said, "is transform science, 15 students at a time."

The course inverts traditional science education. Instead of funneling students down well-worn paths that might lead nowhere, the instructors want thinkers willing to ignore the orthodoxy. Historian of science Thomas Kuhn once described scientific training as "a narrow and rigid education, probably more so than any other except perhaps in orthodox theology." This class catches students before their minds calcify into that shape.

Each week brings a different Harvard researcher presenting an unsolved problem. Michael Segel on aging. Dan Freed on the Millennium Prize Problems in mathematics. Dimitar Sasselov and Adam Cohen on the origin of life. The students don't sit passively — they ask questions that matter to them. Adam Stone, a first-year from Charlotte, North Carolina, has Tourette syndrome, a neurological disorder still poorly understood. He came to the class because learning how to attack unsolved problems felt like learning a skill that could reshape his own life.

Belén Franco de la Matta, from Northvale, New Jersey, noticed something else: the best solutions often come from borrowing thinking styles across disciplines. "In order to solve difficult problems, sometimes you can tackle them with the ways of thinking from other fields," she said.

The comfort of uncertainty

In late September, physicist Peter Galison led a discussion about black holes and what it means to understand something in science. One student asked whether we'll ever uncover all the mysteries, fully understand even one black box.

Galison's answer was honest: We can go far, but much will remain beyond comprehension. "There's almost no branch of science, none, that we can understand completely," he said.

Then Lichtman offered a harder thought: Maybe understanding isn't even the goal. Maybe prediction is all that matters. "The ego of a person cares more about understanding than prediction," he said. "But to make the world work, all that matters, I would argue, is prediction."

A week later, Mansi Srivastava, co-chair of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology, told the class about a hope that turned out to be naive. In the early 2000s, when the first human genomes were sequenced, scientists imagined the genome as a simple blueprint — read the code, predict the organism. It didn't work. Even with complete genetic information and knowledge of environmental factors and epigenetic marks, we still can't fully predict how an organism will develop.

Srivastava posed it as a question: "Do you think even then we'd be able to predict the phenotype? Or is it hopeless?"

When a student answered "Maybe some of it, yeah. Not all of it," Srivastava smiled. "I like your light of hope," she said. "Because if you don't have hope, then we might as well go home."

Her real advice was this: Learn to find joy in the questions themselves. The road will be long — maybe 30 years long — so you'd better love the walking.

This isn't just a class. Logan McCarty, associate dean of science education, calls it "the tip of the iceberg of what we hope is a big reimagining of undergraduate science education." These 15 students are the first cohort of a new narrative — one where the goal isn't to fill your head with answers, but to teach you how to live well with the questions that matter.