Human genes: Time to follow the roads less traveled?

Determining the functions of human genes is a key objective for understanding disease and enabling development of new therapeutic approaches. A number of recent studies have shown that the amount of attention the research community gives to each of the more than 20,000 human genes is dramatically skewed toward specific, well-known genes. In this issue, Stoeger and colleagues uncover the factors that explain this bias and offer a way ahead to move more genes into the research limelight.