About 20,000 Genes Can’t Explain You. Here’s What Does the Rest of the Work

Most of Biology’s Control Chemistry Still Has No Name

In May 2000, some of the best geneticists in the world gathered at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, and in a bar they started betting on how many genes it takes to build a human being.

The guesses ran from about 26,000 to more than 150,000. The real answer came in below all of them. Today the count sits at roughly 20,000 protein-coding genes for a Human, about the same as a microscopic worm.

That number should have changed how we think about life. For the most part, it didn’t.

If the instruction set is that short, something else is doing a lot of the work. My new book, The Ghost Genome, is about that something else.

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