Blogging the Human Genome

All that said, large swaths of human DNA do look expendable. Before the Human Genome Project, most scientists assumed, based on our complex brains and behaviors, that humans must have around 100,000 genes; some estimates went as high as 150,000. To make the debate interesting, some geneticists drinking at a bar one night in 2000 set up a ?gene sweepstakes? with a $1,200 pot for whoever guessed closest to the correct number. More than 150 scientists entered. Usually the guesses in a penny-counting contest like this cluster in a bell curve around the correct answer. Not here: As HGP scientists rifled through the genome, the estimate dropped to 90,000, then 70,000, then 50,000?and kept sinking. The lowest guess (25,947) eventually won the sweepstakes, and most current estimates put the number of human genes below even that.

Source: http://feeds.slate.com/click.phdo?i=76b631b597010bf5c28825977d530af4

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