Warren DeLano

By Iddo on November 5th, 2009

For those who are not in the structural biology community: Warren DeLano wrote and maintained PyMol, the software of choice for molecular visualization. Practically anyone who published anything requiring a biomolecular image used PyMol. It is a great piece of software, powerful and extensible. Warren was strongly committed to writing quality product that served the community well. He was also strongly committed to maintain an open source licence for PyMol. This must be one of the saddest emails I have ever received:

Dear CCP4 Community:
I write today with very sad news about Dr. Warren Lyford DeLano.
I was informed by his family today that Warren suddenly passed
away at home on Tuesday morning, November 3rd.
While at Yale, Warren made countless contributions to the computational tools
and methods developed in my laboratory (the X-PLOR and CNS programs),
including the direct rotation function, the first prediction of
helical coiled coil
structures, the scripting and parsing tools that made CNS a universal
computational
crystallography program.
He then joined Dr. Jim Wells laboratory at USCF and Genentech where he pursued
a Ph.D. in biophysics, discovering some of the principles that govern
protein-protein interactions.
Warren then made a fundamental contribution to biological sciences by
creating the
Open Source molecular graphics program PyMOL that is widely used throughout
the world. Nearly all publications that display macromolecular
structures use PyMOL.
Warren was a strong advocate of freely available software and the Open Source
movement.
Warren’s family is planning to announce a memorial service, but
arrangements have
not yet been made. I will send more information as I receive it.
Please join me in extending our condolences to Warren’s family.
Sincerely yours,
Axel Brunger

Axel T. Brunger
Investigator, Howard Hughes Medical Institute
Professor of Molecular and Cellular Physiology
Stanford University