Jim Kent

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Jim Kent is a research scientist at the University of California, Santa Cruz. While a graduate student in biology there, 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 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, job control management software for the UCSC kilocluster.