OTTAWA The editor of the worlds best-known science journal has issued a call to avoid getting carried away with massive human biology projects that show clear signs of diminishing returns.

Bruce Alberts is editor-in-chief of Science magazine, and a biochemist by training.

What triggered his warning, published Wednesday in an editorial, is the latest biology megaproject: 10 years of work by 442 scientists to create an encyclopedia of DNA elements.

Biology has megaprojects of all sorts. There was the 15-year Human Genome Project, deciphering three billion pieces of our DNA code.

Equally massive studies keep spinning off: proteomics (identifying all the proteins in cells), transcriptomics, epigenomics and metabolomics see the creation of encyclopedia-sized works by hundreds of researchers at many universities and governments, and their staffs.

Whats wrong with that? Alberts warns that the governments funding these projects are producing mountains of data, but not enough understanding.

As a coauthor of a textbook in cell biology that is updated at 5-year intervals, I am painfully aware of the huge gap that remains in our understanding of even the simplest cells, he writes.

For instance, he argues, after 50 years of using the E. coli bacterium as a model, nearly a quarter of its more than 4,000 proteins have unknown functions. He calls this very sobering.

There are clear signs of diminishing returns from the megaprojects, he said. But the culture supporting them remains difficult to stop, and he says its grabbing all the available money.

Alberts is one of the worlds most influential figures in science policy, a past president of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences with a global audience. Hes also a divergent thinker who has railed against the gobbledygook of science jargon and pleaded with researchers to speak (and write) plainer English.

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Biology megaprojects offer ‘diminishing returns,’ warns ex-National Academy of Sciences chief