Warren DeLano

This is quite shocking. I just heard him speak at the eChemInfo conference two weeks back and talked to him briefly. His visualization software Pymol was *the* standard for producing and manipulating beautiful molecular images, and almost all images in all my papers until now were created using Pymol.

This is shocking and saddening. He could not have been more than in his late 30s. I have heard him give talks a couple of times and talked to him at another conference; he was naturally pleased to see Pymol used all over my poster. I think everyone can vouch that he was a cool and fun person. I really wonder what's going to happen to Pymol without him.

Here is a brief note posted by Dr. Axel Brunger in whose lab he greatly helped contribute to the programs X-PLOR and CNS for crystallography and modeling.

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