“Maybe we could get you a meeting with Bill Gates and he could help you.” And he said, “What I’m going to do is invite you to give three lectures here, and give us your view of what the future of biology in medicine is.” And Bill went to all of those lectures. And then after I’d finished, we had dinner and sat and talked for two-and-a-half or three hours about all these possibilities. And then Bill made an offer to help support. The idea was for me to come up and to develop a department of molecular biotechnology, which was really cross-disciplinary in nature.

We developed the key algorithms for the Human Genome Project. That is how to assess the quality of DNA sequence that was generated and how you assemble all the small fragments that were sequenced into their long 270 megabase chromosomal stretches, and so forth.