* I once witnessed an actual fistfight between senior academics, though I will never say who, so don’t ask. It didn’t last long.

* Sir Richard Roberts earned his in 1993 for identifying the strange space fillers in genes called introns, which are discussed later in this chapter. John Sulston, one of the driving forces behind the British effort on the HGP got his call from Stockholm in 2003 for his research into cell death in the nematode worm.

^† The Taj Mahal in Agra, the Millennium Falcon from Star Wars, London’s Tower Bridge, and the Death Star, also from Star Wars.

* Plant genomics is even more weird and unpredictable than in animals. Many plants have enormous genomes, and we’re not sure why, and many have multiple copies of chromosomes. They still run off the same basic and universal principles of biology that show an unequivocal shared ancestry, but when it comes to the mysteries of genomes, plants make ours look like Lego.

* That’s quite a good joke, and true, but in fact, Crick later clarified this apparent error, saying that however plausible the mechanism of the central dogma was, in 1957, there was little experimental evidence to support it. He said that he applied the word dogma with that in mind, as “all religious beliefs were without serious foundation.”

^† Ohno also tried to make music out of the sequences of real DNA encoding four notes of the normal octave scale. It’s not very good.

^‡ I was working at Nature at that time, and with Ewan, and as such I suppose was part of the hype engine. I wrote and produced an animation voiced by the actor/musician/comedian Tim Minchin, which was all part of the press surrounding the release of this dataset. It’s a good cartoon, and I stand by it, while accepting that some of the coverage from the time was perhaps a bit breathless and overreaching. So it goes.

* Gamow was a brilliant and influential physicist, whose work laid significant foundations for Big Bang cosmology. He also wrote a paper with his student Ralph Alpher, and added his friend Hans Bethe to the author list for the sole reason that it would read “Alpher Bethe Gamow,” and is known as the “aßy paper.” He tried unsuccessfully to escape Soviet Russia in 1932 in a canoe. Twice. I thoroughly recommend Life’s Greatest Secret by Matthew Cobb for the definitive version of the story of how we understand the genetic code.

* Craig Venter’s privately funded project ran in parallel to the public consortium of the HGP, under the guise of a company called Celera. They both developed technologies that drove each other forward and spurred each other on in what was effectively a race. It was technically a draw. The journal Science published Venter’s completed work, which included, it turned out, his own genome sequence, and Nature published the HGP’s results. They colluded to publish on the same day and announce together. The HGP has effectively become the benchmark for genomic data, and is by design freely available to all, in perpetuity. It is one of the most highly cited academic papers in the history of academia. I have not met anyone who has accessed the Celera genome for reasons other than curiosity. It is literally a footnote here and, in my opinion, a footnote in the history of science.

* That doesn’t mean that if you have four children, the odds are that one of them will be affected. Each child has the same probability, as each conception is an independent event. In exactly the same way, the probability that you will win any prize in the lottery remains the same if you enter each week.

* They only do so after testing the probability that the variation is likely to be associated with the disease and not some random variation; this is done by comparing the “odds ratios,” which is a statistical tool for establishing whether and how strong the occurrence of one thing is connected with the occurrence of another. In the case of GWAS, it’s used to measure if the presence of a particular genotype is genuinely linked to the disease in question.

* One researcher once told me that she wished that “heritability” was called something entirely made up—she suggested Tralfamadorian Score after the alien species in Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five—and thus we wouldn’t endlessly get tied into debates about what heritability actually means. The same might be said for the following genetic terminology: allele, microsatellite, linkage disequilibrium, epigenetics.

* Not quite true. There are many genetic disorders that mean sex is not as binary as this statement decrees: women with Turner syndrome have only a single X and nothing else. Klinefelter’s is a syndrome in which males are XXY. Biology is never simple.

^† The title of Matt Ridley’s excellent 2003 book on the subject. It was originally coined by the behavioral geneticist David Lykken.

* There is a whole book, probably many, to be written on the heritability of intelligence, and the problems of measuring it, and the possible policies and controversies that follow from this branch of science. This is not that book. I did, however, write and present a series of documentaries for BBC Radio 4 covering this topic, Intelligence: Born Smart, Born Equal, Born Different, which are available for free for an indefinite period.