Jim Kent primarily led the first rough human-genome assembly at the University of California, Santa Cruz.
Kent was a biology graduate student with strong programming skills when the public Human Genome Project needed to turn hundreds of thousands of DNA fragments into an ordered draft. In 2000, he wrote GigAssembler, the software that assembled the public project’s fragmented sequence data into a working draft of the human genome.
Kent completed the assembly in June 2000, shortly before the White House announcement of the first draft. The UCSC team then posted the sequence online on July 7, 2000, giving researchers worldwide free access to the data. The assembly was called a working draft because it still contained gaps and unresolved regions.
David Haussler was Kent’s mentor and scientific collaborator, not the person who wrote most of the assembly code. Eric Lander led the Whitehead/MIT center, while John Sulston and Robert Waterston were major leaders elsewhere in the international consortium. Kent’s role was specifically the computational assembly at UCSC.