Genetic Stone Soup 175
It's the scientific achievment of our generation; what can you say about the mapping of the human genome? But here's a story behind the story. parvati turned us on to this NYT article
about James Kent, who wrote the gene assembly program
GigAssembler
last June. It turns out that, thanks to his code, the public
Human Genome Project
had actually finished its work three days before the private effort by
Celera Genomics
-- a feather in their cap and a boon to public science. The head of Celera was "astonished" to learn of this grad student's genius -- ten thousand lines of C in a month, and why? -- "because of his concern that the genome would be locked up by commercial patents if an assembled sequence was not made publicly available for all scientists to work on." (The debate over
public vs. private science
continues to rage; see
this Seattle P-I article,
which discusses among other things the ethics of NDA'ing scientific data produced for profit.)
Update: 02/13 02:26 PM by J : Thanks to tlunde for finding the link to GigAssembler and thus clarifying which language it was written in.
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