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This article reminded me of one I’ve been trying to find. Many years ago I read a story of how a (lowly) grad student watched the battle between private indust
by sanj 5y ago
This article reminded me of one I’ve been trying to find.
Many years ago I read a story of how a (lowly) grad student watched the battle between private industry sequencing the genome and the university/research team doing so.
He was worried the genome would end up in private hands.
And so stayed up several nights and wrote tight C++ code to line up the data and raced the private team over the finish line.
Maybe it ended up the core of BLASE?
- flobosg 5y agoAssuming you meant BLAST, that tool predates large genome sequencing efforts by a few years. EDIT: I had completely forgotten about BLAT which was in fact developed by Jim Kent!
- keithwinstein 5y agoI think you may be thinking of this: https://www.nytimes.com/2001/02/13/science/reading-the-book-of-life-grad-student-becomes-gene-effort-s-unlikely-hero.html https://www.nytimes.com/2001/02/13/science/reading-the-book-...
- Q6T46nT668w6i3m 5y agoYou’re thinking of Jim Kent and GigAssembler.
- wutbrodo 5y ago> And so stayed up several nights and wrote tight C++ code to line up the data and raced the private team over the finish line. I don't understand. Why would the university team have to finish it before the private team? If the private team finished it and encumbered access to the output, and the university team finished a short while later, wouldn't that have the same effect? Or would there some sort of funding drop-off once the task was achieved, that wouldn't account for whether the output was made accessible?
- qw 5y agoIIRC they were worried that the private company would be able to patent the results and make the data proprietary.
- inciampati 5y agoAt the time it seemed plausible that the first group to sequence the human genome could patent it. That's since been struck down in US patent case law. But it was a real possibility. Although this was a race it's fun to note that both sides we're learning from the other and using resources produced by the other. The assembly techniques were worked out by Gene Myers for instance, who worked at Celera.
- diekhans 5y agoIt was C, Jim Kent hates C++