Friday, June 08, 2001

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"Research on the human genome may well pay fat dividends in 10 or 20 years, but you can make money on it now, the old-fashioned way: by gambling. Find out how on the Web site of Project Ensembl, a European organization that develops genome-related software."

At the May 2000 Annual Meeting on Genome Sequencing and Biology at the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in Long Island, New York, Ewan Birney, team leader of Project Ensembl, proposed GeneSweep, a betting pool to guess the total number of human genes. All bets must be entered by hand, in person, in ink, in a book kept at the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. The winner of the pool, which now stands at a whopping $348, will be announced at the 2003 genome meeting."

redux [02.11.01]
USA Today Human genome makes mind-boggling reading

"The first close reading of the "The Book of Life" ?the 3 billion letters that make up the human genetic code ? reveals that it's packed with more mysteries and surprises than a pulp thriller. Perhaps the biggest surprise since the code was deciphered in June is that it takes just 30,000 to 40,000 genes to make, maintain and repair a human. That's far fewer than the 140,000 genes some had predicted and not many more than an earthworm or a common weed. "If you're judging the complexity of an organism by the number of genes it has, we've just taken a big hit in the pride department," says National Genome Research Institute's director Francis Collins, who also heads the U.S. arm of the international Human Genome Project (HGP)."

BBC Human genome: Nature or nurture?

""The human genome project has revealed that our genetic make-up is far less complicated than first thought.

Researchers have worked out that as few as 30,000 genes are needed to produce a human, only twice as many as the humble fruitfly.

One of the scientists behind the project, Dr Craig Venter says this would suggest our behaviour is not determined by our genes, with environmental factors playing a large part in shaping our thoughts and actions."

redux [05.13.00]
Wired News Amped Geneticists Bet on Genome

"Well, they weren't all men, but mostly. The betting in the pub continued, the lowest bet being 29,800 genes placed by Pat Tome and the highest number coming from John Quackenbush at 118,259.

The pool was organized by Erwin Birney, a team leader at the European Bioinformatics Institute. He tried to convince the bartender to oversee the betting, but was told in no uncertain terms that no gambling was allowed in the Cold Spring bar.

Guesses on the number of genes in the human genome have lowered considerably since the mapping of chromosome 21, which researchers found to contain only 225 genes, far fewer than previously predicted. The researchers on the chromosome 21 study predicted their results could mean that there are as few as 40,000 genes in the entire human genome.

"Someone from Incyte will probably show up and bet 150,000," one gambler said."