For this week's cover story on genetic engineering and its commercial applications, Reporter-Researcher Philip Faflick needed to confirm how many genes there are in a human cell. A call to the Time Inc. library promptly produced the answer: approximately 100,000. Unearthing such arcana is routine for the library's research staff. In recent months, it has been asked the gestation period of a cow (284 days), whether identical twins have the same fingerprints (no), the height of the Venus de Milo (6 ft. 8 in.) and whether worms swim (yes). Sometimes a straightforward answer does not drive home the desired point, and the library prepares a more creative reply. For a story on the skyrocketing price of gold last year, for example, it calculated that a suitcase of the precious metal would buy a tanker of crude oil. "Anything we are asked we will try to answer," says Chief Librarian Ben Lightman, who has been ferreting facts at Time Inc. for 28 years. "If we are unable to locate the information ourselves, we will direct the writer or researcher to a reliable source or authority."

Established in 1923 with little more than a Roget's Thesaurus, a dictionary and a world almanac, the Time Inc. library has grown into the largest facility of its kind in the U.S., with 25 professional librarians and 63 clerks, newspaper markers and indexers. Last year it processed 150,576 queries from the company's various operations, 58,839 from TIME alone. The library contains half a million information folders on people, companies and news topics, 87,000 books and government publications and a running collection of several hundred periodicals. About the only thing it lacks is space, so extraneous or outdated materials are constantly being weeded out. Says Lightman: "We try to keep a rough balance between what comes in and what goes out."

Pat Underwood-Rich, the head research librarian, earned her master's degree in library studies at the University of Hawaii before coming to TIME in 1970 as a book cataloguer. She and her staff are busiest when newsmakers are. Last October the Iran-Iraq war, the labor crisis in Poland and the approaching U.S. presidential election helped swell the number of queries for the month to 7,508. "I think that was an alltime record," says Underwood-Rich. "But I haven't had a chance to check it yet."

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