| Howard Cash was born in Detroit, studied
musical composition and conducting at the University of Pennsylvania and,
after a period as Assistant Conductor with the Pennsylvania Opera Theater,
Psychoacoustics at Stanford. He has been at the forefront of commercial
bioinformatics development since 1984. He joined IntelliGenetics where
some of the seminal biotech software tools were developed. He was the
senior engineer and head of the Expert Systems Group. In 1988, he founded
Gene Codes Corporation
where he remains as President. He designed and developed the "Sequencher"
program used in thousands of academic and commercial DNA sequencing labs
in forty-four countries. In addition to making the most widely used DNA
sequence assembly program, Gene Codes also holds the distinction of being
one of only a handful of profitable bioinformatics companies in the world.
In 1997, Governor John Engler appointed him to the Michigan State
Commission on Genetics, Privacy and Progress. The commission recommended
legislation on a host of issues related to genetic information and privacy
and Cash chaired the committee on Property Rights, Ownership, Collection,
Use and Storage [POCUS]. All recommendations that have come from the
thirteen-member commission have been signed into State law.
Cash has served on several boards, including the Hot Springs Music
Festival and CEBOS Corporation. He is a member of the International
Council of the Kilby Awards Foundation and was recently elected to the
HUGO Council, the managing body of HUGO, the international Human Genome
Organization. In 2002, Cash received the prestigious "Entrepreneur of the
Year" award for Michigan from Ernst and Young.
In September, 2001, Cash was asked to put his company at the disposal
of the New York Office of the Chief Medical Examiner and to develop new
software for DNA analysis and data handing for the purpose of identifying
the remains of those killed at the World Trade Center (read
the May 2002 article in Michigan Craintech). A new corporation called
Gene Codes Forensics, Inc. was formed to focus exclusively on this
project. It has been a daunting task from a technical standpoint, and has
also raised ethical and legal issues involving jurisdiction, family rights
and genetic privacy.
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