How did you react to the news? Did it feel rather like being told that you had only got 30% in an examination, or only a third of the salary you had expected?
Worse than only having 30,000 genes is the comparison with a small garden weed with 26,000 and a fruit fly with 14,000 genes. Professor Bowbrow was not to be upset.
'Knowing that a fruit fly only has slightly fewer genes than me doesn't make me feel degraded - they are pretty complex things; they have four wings and can fly - I can't do that'. Others feel that the news will 'be a source of humility and a blow to the idea of human uniqueness' (S. Paabo, Max Plank Institute, Germany). Underlying these responses is the unspoken assumption that we are only as valuable as our genes. DNA and genes have been elevated in the public perspective to a supernatural position. They are 'the recipe for making a human being', they 'contain and create information in coded language' to 'make us' what we are.
