Jim Kent famously wrote GigAssembler, the breakthrough program that allowed the publicly funded Human Genome Project to successfully assemble the full human genome just 1 day ahead of their corporate competitor Celera, in 2000 while pursuing his PhD in Biology at USC Santa Cruz. He was 40 years old at the time. Without his incredible programming effort, it is very likely that Celera would have attempted to make the human genome data proprietary, and we would be looking at a dramatically different landscape in genetics and medicine today.
I am putting off grad school indefinitely, and this story always inspires me that I should go back one day when I'm ready.
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Jim Kent famously wrote GigAssembler, the breakthrough program that allowed the publicly funded Human Genome Project to successfully assemble the full human genome just 1 day ahead of their corporate competitor Celera, in 2000 while pursuing his PhD in Biology at USC Santa Cruz. He was 40 years old at the time. Without his incredible programming effort, it is very likely that Celera would have attempted to make the human genome data proprietary, and we would be looking at a dramatically different landscape in genetics and medicine today.
I am putting off grad school indefinitely, and this story always inspires me that I should go back one day when I'm ready.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Kent [2] http://www.nytimes.com/2001/02/13/science/reading-the-book-o...