In 1991, Ewan Birney, a lad of 19, left England with his high-school diploma and went to Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL) to "fool around" for a year before going to college. His visit was part of a program devised by CSHL president James Watson. The best science student in the graduating class at Eton would live with the Watsons and work at the lab, in this case with Adrian Krainer.
In Krainer's lab, Birney was trying to characterize proteins involved in RNA splicing, in particular, ones that included a specific RNA recognition motif. At the start, Birney handled most of the wet work while Sanjay Kumar, now of New England BioLabs, did the data analysis. But the following summer, when Birney returned to CSHL for the season, he started writing code himself. Craig Venter had just released the first expressed tag sequence (EST) database, and Birney was itching to ...
