The gene pool

Any good journalist knows that, if you can’t deliver the facts, at least you can offer up a bit of entertainment. Genome scientists have co-opted that strategy when it comes to the seemingly immortal question of how many human genes there are. Frankly, nobody seems to have a clue. So at the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory genome meeting this May, they decided to collect a different form of data — more than 200 wagers, betting on the right number. And that, in turn, made for some good copy. “Playful scientists have given a whole new meaning to the term ‘gene pool’,” wrote Tom Abate in the San Francisco Chronicle. “At a five-day conference last week on the Human Genome Project, microbiologists took time out from their headache-inducing lectures to create the scientific equivalent of an office pool.” Abate himself lost a gamble by attending the meeting. Based on nothing more than a hunch, he’d bet that The Big Announcement — from Celera or the Human Genome Project — would be made at the annual genomics meeting. Still, he got a good yarn out of the trip. “At this august gathering, 27-year-old European computer whiz [Ewan] Birney walked around with a notebook soliciting opinions on the hottest topic in DNA research — just how many genes there are in the human genome.” Birney actually “scooped” Francis Collins, head of the National Institute for Human Genome Research, by initiating this bet. Collins had planned to propose a contest in his keynote address, but Birney came up with the idea independently and started collecting guesses and dollars the day before. He offered Collins an opportunity to announce the results of the preliminary statistical analysis. (Of the first 228 bets, the mean guess was 62,598, and the range was 27,462–200,000). The ground rules and current data are at http://www.ensembl.org/genesweep.html. Collins bet his buck on 48,011, according to Science, though the magazine noted “some researchers are holding out for an Anna Kareninasized word count, arguing that human complexity cannot be explained any other way. An editor for Nature Genetics, lurking at the meeting, realized that her publication, too, was about to be scooped. The June issue of Nature Genetics had three papers in press on this very topic. So the journal decided to manipulate its own embargo (shame on any journalist who tries this) to ride the publicity generated by the genome-meeting wager.