Involvement With The Human Genome Project
While working on his PhD in Biology at the University of California, Santa Cruz, Kent in May 2000, wrote a program, GigAssembler, that allowed the publicly funded Human Genome Project to assemble and publish the human genome sequence. His efforts were motivated by the research needs of himself and his colleagues, but also out of concern that the data might be made proprietary via patents by Celera Genomics. In his close race with Celera, Kent and the UCSC Professor David Haussler quickly built a modest cluster of 50 commodity Personal Computers running the Linux operating system to run the software. In contrast Celera was using what was thought of then as one of the most powerful civilian supercomputers in the world. His first assembly on the human genome was released on June 22. Celera finished its assembly on June 25, and the dual results were announced at the White House on June 26. On July 7, the Santa Cruz data was made publicly available on the Web Wide Web. In 2002 Tim O'Reilly described Kent's work as "the most significant work of open source development in the past year". While all of Kent's genomics software is open source in the sense that the source code can be downloaded and read for free, and all of the software can be freely used for academic, nonprofit, and personal use, some of it requires a license, either from UCSC or from Kent Informatics Inc., for commercial use.
After GigAssembler, Kent went on to write BLAT (BLAST-like alignment tool) and the UCSC Genome Browser to help analyze important genome data, receiving his PhD in biology in 2002. As of June 2012, Kent continues to work at UCSC primarily on web tools to help understand the human genome. He helps maintain and upgrade the browser, and has worked on comparative genomics, Parasol, a job control management software for the UCSC kilocluster, and the ENCODE Project.
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