# Jim Kent **Domain:** Genome Informatics / Software / Open Science **Doc Type:** Builder Node **Maturity:** Developed ## Definition **Jim Kent** is a programmer and computational biologist who wrote GigAssembler for the public human-genome working draft and became a principal architect of the UCSC Genome Browser. ## Nexus Context UC Santa Cruz records describe Kent writing approximately 10,000 lines of assembly code in four weeks in 2000. The public draft was completed on June 22 and made available online on July 7. [[articles/The Evolutionary Roots of Silicon Valley|The Evolutionary Roots of Silicon Valley]] treats the episode as a constitutional event as much as a technical one: assembly prevented fragments from remaining unusable, while public release prevented the reference from becoming accessible only on private terms. The “garage” narrative should not erase the wider consortium, computing infrastructure and team. Kent's contribution was extraordinary but embedded in a distributed public project. ## Sources / Provenance - UCSC Genome Browser history: https://genome.ucsc.edu/goldenPath/history.html - UC Santa Cruz, genome anniversary history: https://news.ucsc.edu/2015/06/genome-anniversary/ ## See Also [[wiki/David Haussler|David Haussler]], [[wiki/Human Genome Assembly|Human Genome Assembly]], [[wiki/UCSC Genome Browser|UCSC Genome Browser]], [[wiki/Knowledge Commons|Knowledge Commons]]