Microsoft has been hunting for a way to speed up the building of broadband networks that will link its operating systems across the Internet.

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In 2005 Lankford ditched a comfortable salary, hired away an engineer from Reuters and went hunting for consulting gigs optimizing speed performance for trading firms and hardware vendors.

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The genome project, which the government began in 1987, aimed to speed the gene-hunting effort by providing the first full map of all 3 billion base pairs that make up human DNA. (It was not necessary, in this effort, to run through all the pairs on each set of chromosomes, or 6 billion pairs.) And because the base pairs come in only four varieties, they are digital and ideal for computer decoding.

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