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The Genes That Never Go Out of Style

This article begins with The Human Genome Project, a project to guess the number of genes in the human genome and its completion in 2003. In general, there are still debates about the exact number, but it is generally agreed that there are around 19,000-22,000 gene in the human genome. The article discusses how even after the completion of this project, researchers still only research genes that are already well studied. According to the article, 16% of the genes known back in 1991, accounted for half of the research papers in 2015 and a quarter of the genes have never been researched before. The article agrees that scientists do research the important genes (i.e. those that protect against diseases like cancer), however since many genes have never been looked at, researchers may be overlooking some important genes. The author refers to these genes as “celebrity genes” because they get “over 8000 times more attention than their neglected counterparts”. The author and other researchers in the article express how they find it unfortunate that we still know barely anything about so many genes.

 

This article relates to the “rich get richer phenomenon” taught in class. Genes that have already been studied are studied even more by scientists, while gene less studied or even not studied at all, do not get studied by scientists. A gene’s popularity relates to how important they seem based on the information known about it. Since a gene seems important, more scientists will want study to it more. So the amount of research for an already well researched gene increases. In other words, these already “rich” genes get “richer”. The article specifically points out how junior scientists (those without their own labs) are more likely to study these popular genes because they are more likely to get funding by researching these popular genes.  

https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/09/the-popularity-contest-of-human-genes/570586/

 

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