I hope you are wrong about <50%, but you may be right. I'd be curious as to a reasonable lower bound of human knowledge about human biology; do we know at least 25% of the fundamentals?
So I’d actually disagree. I think we know most of the fundamental principles of biology. The basic ideas underlying genome replication, RNA expression, and protein translation are very well understood. These are the core defining processes of life and we’ve basically figured out their most important, most highly conserved interactions.
The trick with biology is figuring out how these processes are controlled. Every aspect of cellular behavior has absolutely enormous combinatorial complexity. Take the EGFR protein for example. Its a receptor protein that seems to be important in controlling growth of cells. The EGFR protein has (I believe) at least twenty different locations that it can be modified. Each modification changes it’s shape and the other proteins that it can interact with. Each combination of interactions, in fact. So this one protein has at least a million different possible variants. Then consider that there are at least 20k different human genes and there are many many different ways that interactions between proteins, genes, and RNA are modified and regulated. Again, all the fundamental processes are understood, like we understand how EGFR gets modified. These processes are combined and remixed in an absolutely astronomically huge variety of ways.
A big problem right now in biology is the framing of these fundamentals in education. We know some things, but they're typically presented fairly piecewise in higher education.
One example of the fragmentation:
You're in an oncology lab? - study this particular protein and DNA damage association - but cell cycle is downplayed. Or vice versa. There's a lot of segmentation that goes on when the processes are really part of the same system.
In terms of fundamentals, I think we really need to switch towards starting biology education with just the pieces of the minimally viable cell. By using this as a tool to base everything upon, we can make biology a bit more scientific, rather than just the list of observations that it tends to swing towards today.
