This paper presents a background and overview for task 1 (of 2 tasks) of the KDD Challenge Cup 2002, a competition held in conjunction with the ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (KDD), July 23--26, 2002. Task 1 dealt with detecting which papers, in a set of fruitfly genetics papers (texts), contained experimental results about gene products (transcripts and proteins), and also within each paper, which genes had experimental results about their products mentioned.