IBM has become the second information technology company (the other being Motorola) to join the SNP Consortium, a two-year, $50 million initiative being led by 10 pharmaceutical companies and the Wellcome Trust to identify and analyze at least 300,000 single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) in the human genome. Each member contributes $3 million toward the research effort, and each has a seat on the consortium board (Nat. Biotechnol., 17, 526). IBM consolidated its disparate biological resources into an internal life sciences industry organization in 1999, and in December announced a $100 million initiative to build the Blue Gene supercomputer for modeling protein folding (Nat. Biotechnol. 18, 8, 2000). Understanding how particular genes, groups of genes, or genomic variants affect gene and protein expression and integrating that information across large numbers of individuals is “an information technology challenge, if not more than a biology challenge,” says Arthur Holden, chairman and CEO of the SNP Consortium. IBM was motivated to join the consortium by its desire “to do the proof of concept in real customer situations,” according to an IBM spokesperson.