PALO ALTO, Calif.--The Stanford University School of Medicine here is building a national biocomputational center through a partnership with NASA that could benefit the Human Genome Project, officials said. Although the primary use of the center will be to study the use of virtual reality in medicine, it will be made available for other uses, including the Human Genome Project, according to Murial Ross, a NASA neuroscientist and director of the agency's Biocomputational Center in Moffet Field, Calif.
"NASA has the capability to analyze huge amounts of data," she said, explaining how the center could benefit the project by crunching raw data. Stephen Schendel, the new center's director, said it could be operational by year's end and added that he is looking to hire a couple of computer programmers with graphics experience to work at the center, he noted. NASA is funding the still-unnamed Stanford center with $500,000 annually for the next five years.