Humble Pi: When Math Goes Wrong in the Real World

by Matt Parker

Thankfully, on the tenth human chromosome is the gene that encodes for the production of this enzyme. The gene has the catchy name of MARCH5, and if you think that looks a lot like a date, then you can already see where this is going. Over on your first chromosome, the gene SEP15 is busy making some other important protein. Type those gene names into Excel and they’ll transform into 5-Mar and 15-Sep, encoded as 3/5/2019 and 9/15/2019 (or whatever the current year is) in the Formula Bar of the US version. All mention of MARCH5 and SEP15 has been obliterated. Do biologists use Excel much to process their data? Is the phosphoglycan C-terminal?! Yes! (Well, I think it is. It was that or “Do BPIFB1 genes secrete in the woods?!” but I wasn’t confident about that one either. I’m way beyond my limit of biological knowledge trying to look up even obvious microbiology things.) Look: the point is yes. Cell biologists use Excel a lot. In 2016 three intrepid researchers in Melbourne analyzed eighteen journals that had published genome research between 2005 and 2015 and found a total of 35,175 publicly available Excel files associated with 3,597 different research papers. They wrote a program to autodownload the Excel files, then scan them for lists of gene names, keeping an eye out for where they had been “autocorrected” by Excel into something else. After checking through the offending files manually to remove false positives, the researchers were left with 987 Excel spreadsheets (fro...