I’m just greatful that our newspapers bother to publish any science at all no matter how un-newsworthy you think it is. Genomes are lot more interesting and significant than most of the so called “news”. Why don’t write an article that synthesizes a lot of significant findings from individual genomes (and which you presumably find interesting) and submit that to the newspapers. I believe that is part of the “Carl Zimmer job descriptor”. Newspapers have limited space and so they tend to focus on short articles that most people may get in the 25 seconds or so they actually bother to read them.

Regarding genome papers per se, I think many of these genome papers, mine included represent a strange hybrid between review papers and new discovery. Sometimes, the new discoveries in the genome papers are really interesting and important. But much of the time they are not. So they are cool in a way in that they represent a focus point for everything that is cool and important about an organism, or a branch in the tree of life. And in many cases, genome papers report really novel and interesting findings. But if I can restate what Carl sort of said in my own way – I think the issue with the 1000th microbial genome paper and the 50th animal genome paper and so on is not that the science is bad – the problem is that there is lots of good science out there and that genome papers have gotten a bit more attention than they deserve. Genome sequences are great – they are my scientific life blood. But lets not overhype them at the expense of other fantastically interesting stuff being done in genetics, cell biology, ecology, evolution, neurobiology, microbiology, etc.

[CZ: But who decides that there will be such an occasion? And why is that occasion so often the sequencing of a genome?]