James Kent is awarded the 2003 Benjamin Franklin Award for developing ``GigAssembler,'' a 10,000 line program that he wrote in a month and then used to assemble the public human genome fragments. This was accomplished before Celera Genomics was able to assemble their private genome, helping to keep the data in the public domain and unrestricted by commercial patents.

Slides from Dr. Kent's laureate seminar (844 kB PowerPoint)