It was a somewhat historic event when President Bill Clinton announced, on 26 June 2000, the completion of the first survey of the entire human genome. We were able for the first time to read all three billion letters of the human genetic make-up. This information was the ground-breaking result of the Human Genome Project. The success of this project relied on advanced technology, such as a number of experimental molecular biology methods. However, it also required a significant contribution from more theoretical disciplines such as computer science. Thus, in the final phase of the project, numerous pieces of information like those in a giant jigsaw puzzle needed to be appropriately combined. This step was critically dependent on programming efforts. Adding further tension to the programming exercises was the fact that a private company, Celera, was competing with the academic Human Genome Project. This competition was sometimes referred to as ‘the Genome War’ (Shreeve, 2004). While computationally talented people like Jim Kent ‘churned out computer code’, other gifted bioinformaticians, such as Gene Myers at Celera, worked on related jigsaw-puzzle problems. Ideally, scientists should not war against each other; however, there was an important conclusion from these projects in which important genetic information was generated: computing is an essential part of biological research.