READING THE BOOK OF LIFE; Grad Student Becomes Gene Effort's
Unlikely Hero  Published: February 13, 2001  A surprising hero
helped the consortium of academic scientists decoding the human
genome to avoid a drubbing by its rival, the Celera Genomics
company. Scientists throughout the world are now beating an
electronic path to his Web site, where they can analyze and
download the human genome sequence. He is a graduate student at
the University of California at Santa Cruz, and his name is not
Clark but James Kent.  In four hectic weeks last spring, Mr.
Kent wrote a computer program that the consortium's leaders
hadn't realized how much they needed, one that assembles the
400,000 fragments of DNA they had decoded into a coherent
sequence. Using 100 computers that his senior colleague, Dr.
David Haussler, had persuaded the university to buy for the
purpose, Mr. Kent performed his first assembly on the human
genome on June 22, just four days before Dr. Francis S. Collins,
the consortium's informal leader, and Dr.