Recorded: 08 May 2012
So, very close to Christmas 1999, I got a call form Eric Lander and he said: ‘We’re in a serious competition now with Celera to do the human genome and very soon we’ll be in a position to actually start analyzing the human genome sequence to find the genes and I’m familiar with your work in analyzing the genes with hidden Markov models’ – this was something Eric had used, hidden Markov models was something he had used previously in his work – ‘and so I’d like you to join the team to do the analysis of the genes in the human genome, are you in?’ I said: ‘Well of course I’m in! This is an extraordinary opportunity, what’s the, what’s the schedule? When, when are we going to have a sequence to look at?’ We went through and discussed at length how the pieces of the genome were being obtained and assembled and what the plans were, but I got the initial correct impression that things were quite influx.
David Haussler (born 1953) is an American bioinformatician known for his work leading the team that assembled the first human genome sequence in the race to complete the Human Genome Project and subsequently for comparative genome analysis that deepens understanding the molecular function and evolution of the genome. He is a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator, professor of biomolecular engineering and director of the Center for Biomolecular Science and Engineering at the University of California, Santa Cruz, director of the California Institute for Quantitative Biosciences (QB3) on the UC Santa Cruz campus, and a consulting professor at Stanford University School of Medicine and UC San Francisco Biopharmaceutical Sciences Department.