PyMOL Author Passed Away!

One of the great scientist was passed away one month ago, he is the author of PyMOL, the open source molecular visualization program. This is a little bit information about him from his family.

On November 3rd, 2009 we tragically lost Warren Lyford DeLano. This was the result of a sudden and tragic onset of anxiety. For the last 7 years Warren DeLano had been a loving husband, brother and son. He wrote an open source software program called Pymol that dramatically improved how computational scientist were able to do their research. He started DeLano Scientific to focus his time and energy on this product. Before that, he was a founding scientist at Sunesis Pharmaceuticals.

He came into this world June 21st, 1972 in Philadelphia, PA. By the time he was four his family had moved to Palo Alto, California where he attended high school at Henry M. Gunn. There he was involved in the Theater program and managed all productions that were put on during his senior year. From there he moved on to Yale where he joined Axel Brunger’s lab, a powerhouse of Structural Biology research. Axel helped Warren develop and hone his two passions, science and computers. After only three years Warren got his degrees in both Computer Science and Molecular Biophysics & Biochemistry, yet he stayed on for another year working in Axel’s lab. His time at Yale was significant for his personal life as well, as he met his wife Beth Pehrson there.

He returned to California to pursue a PhD at University of California, San Francisco. There he was able to join Jim Well’s lab, later following him to a start-up, Sunesis Pharmaceuticals.

Warren was a passionate biochemist whose life's work was to make open-source scientific software of the highest standards available to the bioscience community. PyMOL, his open-source molecular visualization system, is used by pharmaceutical, biotechnology, and educational institutions worldwide. Significantly, PyMOL is not only a powerful three-dimensional visualization program, it is freely available to the general scientific community and it is considered one of the premier tools in its field.

We, his family, acutely feel the loss of Warren. But the scientific community also lost someone who was committed to providing innovative and readily-accessible tools to further molecular research. We will never know the future innovations he might have introduced if Warren lived another 10, 20 or 30 more years. His passion and intelligence could have had an even greater impact on the biological sciences.