O’Reillynet interviews Jim Kent:
Jim Kent was a graduate student in biology at the University of California, Santa Cruz (UCSC), when he wrote the program that allowed the public human genome team to assemble its fragments just before Celera’s private commercial effort. His program ensured that the human genome data would remain in the public domain. Kent wrote the 10,000-line program in a month because he didn’t want to see the genome data locked up by commercial patents.