Jim Kent

Jim Kent (born February 10, 1960) is an American research scientist and computer programmer. He has been a major contributor to genome database projects.

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Biography

Kent was born in Hawaii and grew up in San Francisco, California, United States. He currently lives in Santa Cruz, California with his two children, Mira and Tisa Kent, ages 16 and 15.

While a graduate student in biology at the University of California, Santa Cruz, he wrote the program that allowed the publicly funded Human Genome Project to assemble and publish the human genome database before the commercial effort by the company Celera Genomics^[1]. His efforts ensured that the human genome data remained in the Public Domain and were not patented into private Intellectual Property.

Kent built a grid of cheap, commodity Personal Computers running the Linux operating system and other Free software to beat Celera's, what was thought of then as the world's most powerful civilian computer. In June 2000, thanks to the work done by Kent and several others, the Human Genome Project was able to publish its data in the Public Domain just hours ahead of Celera. In 2002 Tim O'Reilly described Kent's work as "the most significant work of open source development in the past year".

Kent went on to write BLAT (BLAST-like alignment tool) ^[1] and the UCSC Human Genome Browser to help analyze important genome data, receiving his PhD in biology in 2002. Today at UCSC he works primarily on web tools to help understand the human genome. He helps maintain and upgrade the browser, and has worked on recent projects such as comparative genomics and Parasol, a job control management software for the UCSC kilocluster.

See also

• Human Genome Project#The Role of Celera Genomics

References

Notes

1. ^ Keeping Genome Data Open - An Interview with Jim Kent. OReilly Network. Retrieved on 2005-12-23.