It's sad to hear that Warren DeLano, author of PyMOL, passed away

From a couple of mailing lists, I heard the sad news that Warren DeLano, author of PyMOL, passed away on Tuesday morning, November 3rd. He was only 37!

I have never met Dr. DeLano personally, nor even I communicated with him by email, but I am very aware of PyMol, the de facto standard nowadays for molecular graphics. In writing 3DNA Nature Protocols paper, I dug more deeply into PyMol. I was impressed by its interactive interface to .r3d files (Raster3D) and the high quality ray-traced images it produced. So I came up with a Perl script (x3dna_r3d2png) to convert automatically from a 3DNA generated .r3d file to a PNG image through the PyMol engine.

Through his seminal contributions to PyMol, Dr. DeLano achieved something very few others in computational chemistry/biology can match: he successfully mobilized literately thousands of software programmers and ordinary users from multi-disciplines to join him to produce phenomenal pictures, each of which is worth a thousand words!

It was due to Dr. DeLano's vision that he made PyMol open source so the community now has the possibility/opportunity to continue support and further improve the software. At this stage, however, no one is likely to knows PyMol code to the depth Dr. DeLano did, not to mention the leadership and enthusiasm that he brought to the project. Whatever the case, the community undoubtedly would appreciate Dr. DeLano's valuable contributions.

Thanks, Dr. DeLano, for bring PyMol to the world!