By Patrick Kulp
“It was half a year into the new millennium when Human Genome Project leader Francis Collins announced internally that the consortium would be presenting a first draft of a fully sequenced human genome at the White House in around a month’s time.
“The only problem? The teams didn’t yet have a sequenced genome—it was more like a “pile of DNA” fragments, according to David Haussler, scientific director at the UC Santa Cruz Genomics Institute. And the deadline was part of a negotiated tie in the heated race with biotech company Celera.
“‘That was like a thunderbolt,’ Haussler told Tech Brew. ‘There was no way we were ready to do any kind of presentation.’
“A UC Santa Cruz grad student named Jim Kent ‘worked night and day for four weeks, writing 20,000 lines of C code and icing his wrists periodically,’ in order to make the historic milestone possible.”