Ewan Birney opened a betting book at a meeting of the Human Genome Project in 2000. For a dollar a bet, he asked the world’s top geneticists to predict how many genes a human has. The prize for the nearest guess was the pot and a bottle of scotch. The winning bet, by Lee Rowen, was 25,947. The real number is around 20,000.
-Adam Rutherford, A Brief History Of Everyone Who Ever Lived 2016