British and Swiss geneticists had spent £8m on the pointless project and unveiled the complicated and unintelligible results at a stilted press conference in Geneva on Tuesday. But it soon became apparent that none of the journalists present neither knew nor cared what the mouse genome was, nor what it was for.

‘Now we come to think about it, we realise that this is pretty uninteresting stuff,’ said geeky, white-coated project leader Dr Martin Jackson of Suffolk University. ‘We thought that maybe the journalists were just particularly ignorant but it turns out that the general public doesn’t give a toss about any of the weird DNA crap we’ve been doing either. We’ve just been wasting our lives.’

Sequencing the mouse genome, says Dr Jackson, might possibly allow scientists to do nerdy stuff like curing Alzheimer’s disease ‘and shit like that’. But polls suggest that fewer than 6% of people take any interest in genome sequencing technology, although that did rise to 11% among people who thought that genomes were garden ornaments. ‘I really enjoyed the work when I began doing it,’ Dr Jackson admitted. ‘But now I’m starting to think I should have ditched the white coat and goatee and spent more time chasing women. Mouse genome? What a bloody waste of time.’