Biomedical research has been previously reported to primarily focus on a 
minority of all known genes. Here, we demonstrate that these differences in 
attention can be explained, to a large extent, exclusively from a small set of 
identifiable chemical, physical, and biological properties of genes. Together 
with knowledge about homologous genes from model organisms, these features allow 
us to accurately predict the number of publications on individual human genes, 
the year of their first report, the levels of funding awarded by the National 
Institutes of Health (NIH), and the development of drugs against 
disease-associated genes. By explicitly identifying the reasons for 
gene-specific bias and performing a meta-analysis of existing computational and 
experimental knowledge bases, we describe gene-specific strategies for the 
identification of important but hitherto ignored genes that can open novel 
directions for future investigation.