If we use an average protein subunit MW of 40,000, that converts to a total protein MW of 1 X 10^9. Dividing by the average amino acide mass of 115 gives 8.7 million total residues. At 3 nucleic acids per residue, that could be coded in a total of 26,000,000 bases. Stored as ASCII, you could fit the information for about four humans on a 105 Megabyte Zip cartridge. An iPod would store far more.
30 to 35 thousand genes seemed a reasonable number to me. These new figures are pushing the envelop a bit far for comfort.
Y’know, I keep telling these guys NOT to keep this information on magnetic media, but they never listen to me. All it’s gonna take is some smartass with a fridge magnet and “Bam” we’ll all have bat wings, rhinoceros horns and genitalia the size of a small car.
In the UK a few years back Prospect magazine was giving the whole sequence away as a marketing gimmick on a CD taped to the cover of one month’s issue. Though goodness knows whether any of their readers actually found it any more useful than an AOL free-trial CD.
I’m not upgrading until version 3.0 - supposedly, they’re finally implementing WYSIWYG editing. But I must admit I’m glad that, for once, they’re working to reduce code-bloat.