Tim Hubbard claims he knows nothing about genetics. But he was drawn into the high-stakes world of genomics by a job offer he couldn’t refuse. Hubbard had been working on algorithms for predicting protein structures at the MRC Centre for Protein Engineering in the United Kingdom when he noticed that the Sanger Institute in Hinxton was looking to hire some new bioinformaticists. “I really wanted to continue what I was doing,” he recalls. “But when I came to interview, they said, ‘Well, that would be fine, but, there’s also a more senior position open. It would just involve looking after the annotation of the human genome, which would hardly take up any of your time.’” Hubbard hasn’t done any structure prediction since.
When he arrived in 1997, Sanger was “a sequencing factory,” says Hubbard. Scientists at the Institute were just wrapping up the worm sequence and were gearing up to ...
