Today we’d like to introduce you to Ben Glick.
Ben, can you briefly walk us through your story – how you started and how you got to where you are today.
As the head of an academic molecular biology research lab, I was frustrated by the large amount of effort that was wasted during routine gene manipulation experiments. My lab and many others suffered because researchers made avoidable mistakes and struggled to maintain complete records. In the 21st century, molecular biologists often still didn’t know the full properties of the DNA molecules they were using.
I also perceived that there was a solution: good software. If molecular biology software were easier to use than pen and paper, researchers would naturally plan their cloning procedures with computers, thereby avoiding errors and automatically producing electronic records.
To achieve this goal, I brought together a group of scientists, software engineers, usability experts, and product developers. The company won Phase I and II SBIR grants from the NIH to develop our software product, which we named SnapGene. Working with labs around the world, we created software to meet the everyday needs of molecular biologists. Each enhancement has generated new ideas, and SnapGene is still in active development, evolving as the field is changing. SnapGene was conceived in 2002 and commercially launched in 2012. It is now used in virtually every major research institution and half of the largest biotech and pharma companies worldwide.
Great, so let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall and if not, what were the challenges you’ve had to overcome?
With no background in software development, I didn’t realize how hard it would be, or how long it would take, to create software that is truly useful and easy to use. We didn’t make much progress until we became students of human-computer interaction, which is a discipline that aims to create software interfaces that act as an extension of the user’s mind. We were fortunate to find the ideal programmer, Will Stokes, to lead development, and to win grant funding to support his work.
SnapGene – what should we know? What do you guys do best? What sets you apart from the competition?
We make molecular biology software. I know that molecular biology isn’t an everyday thing for most people, but it’s a key technology for all of modern biomedical research and development. One thing that makes SnapGene different from our competitors is that instead of crunching large amounts of data, we focus on streamlining the procedures that molecular biologists do in the laboratory.
What moment in your career do you look back most fondly on?
I’m still a basic scientist running an academic lab, so many of my proudest moments have to do with the accomplishments of my research lab, and moments when we figured out something about the Golgi apparatus, the organelle I study. As far as SnapGene goes, my proudest moments have been times when I got confirmation that SnapGene really was making science move faster, which was my goal all along. The other night, my wife (SnapGene VP of Product Management, Aline Glick) and I met our daughter’s Biology teacher at parent’s night and found out that she used SnapGene in graduate school. That was pretty cool, too.
Contact Info:
- Website: www.snapgene.com
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