To celebrate the millennium, the emperor was originally promised at least 100,000, a pair for every day of the 300 years he hoped to reign. But when the huge chests were delivered to his palace, he found only 20,000, and even those were padded out with huge bales of junk material.

“These will only last me 60 years, the lifespan of a mere mortal!” he complained.

“No matter, sir. In what we have delivered you will eventually find the cure for all those ailments from which you might die. Those will prolong your life, even ultimately achieve immortality. Just wait ten more years and you will see the magic potions appear in their hundreds.”

The emperor waited patiently. But the genes failed to deliver their magic.

“Where are all the hundreds of magic potions?”

The courtiers meekly reply: “Sir, it’s rather disappointing. You can count them on the fingers of one hand.”

“What went wrong?”

“Well, it’s embarrassing but we really don’t yet know. But we’ll try again. Give us another ten years.”

Sadly, this is a true story and it is a story of our time, not several millennia ago. When the ambitious project to read ‘The Book of Life’ was launched back in 1987 politicians and research administrators were indeed persuaded that we would identify hundreds of new therapeutic targets. The project cannot be blamed for finding only 20,000 instead of 100,000 genes. And it is certainly true that sequencing the genomes of many species has greatly illuminated our understanding of evolutionary biology. But it has not led to much success in enabling the development of new therapies. Even the leaders of the project admit that the outcome has been disappointing. In fact it has been disastrous. The output of the pharmaceutical industry has declined to become pitifully small while the investment has ballooned enormously.