Many years ago I read a story of how a (lowly) grad student watched the battle between private industry sequencing the genome and the university/research team doing so.
He was worried the genome would end up in private hands.
And so stayed up several nights and wrote tight C++ code to line up the data and raced the private team over the finish line.
Maybe it ended up the core of BLASE?
I don't understand. Why would the university team have to finish it before the private team? If the private team finished it and encumbered access to the output, and the university team finished a short while later, wouldn't that have the same effect? Or would there some sort of funding drop-off once the task was achieved, that wouldn't account for whether the output was made accessible?
Although this was a race it's fun to note that both sides we're learning from the other and using resources produced by the other. The assembly techniques were worked out by Gene Myers for instance, who worked at Celera.
EDIT: I had completely forgotten about BLAT which was in fact developed by Jim Kent!