According to Tim Hubbard, a computational biologist at the Sanger Centre in Cambridge, England, the big question in protein modelling is why ab initio modelling has hitherto been so unsuccessful.

ECONOMIST: REPORT: COMPUTING: Big Blue��s big bet | The

That was anathema to Dr Collins and his British counterpart, John Sulston (who was head of the Wellcome Trust's Sanger Centre, now known as the Sanger Institute, which did about a third of the public project), who wanted genes to be public goods and started racing Celera to stop the firm finding genes first.

ECONOMIST: The big beasts of genomics