Warren Lyford DeLano

Warren Lyford DeLano (June 21, 1972 – November 3, 2009) was an advocate for the increased adoption of open source practices in the sciences, and especially drug discovery, where advances which save time and resources can also potentially save lives.

Biography

Born in Philadelphia on June 21, 1972, DeLano was educated at Yale University, where he helped produce campus humor magazine The Yale Record.^[1]

In 2000, he launched the PyMOL open-source molecular viewer in an attempt to demonstrate the practical impact open source might have on discovery of new medicines. Since then, PyMOL has been widely adopted for molecular structure visualization within the pharmaceutical industry and at public sector research institutions.

In 2003, DeLano founded DeLano Scientific LLC to commercialize PyMOL and conduct an experiment in the "laboratory of the market" regarding the commercial viability of an open source software company. His hypothesis was that open source software is intrinsically optimal for science, and that scientific software companies which provide open source solutions will, through free market competition, eventually displace companies that favor proprietary solutions.

Delano was married to Beth Pehrson.

He died unexpectedly on 3 November 2009 at his home in Palo Alto, California.^[2]

Public quotes

Lack of access to effective software continues to be a major hindrance to scientific progress and therapeutic discovery. For the benefit of all society, we need to pursue new and complementary approaches to the creation and dissemination of scientific software.

— Warren Lyford DeLano, the DeLano Scientific LLC about page

The only way to publish software in a scientifically robust manner is to share source code, and that means publishing via the internet in an open-access/open-source fashion.

— Warren Lyford DeLano, Computational Chemistry List on 12 October 2005

To the pharmaceutical manager, tasked with delivery of robust information systems, open source is simply a way to gain increased flexibility and lower upfront costs in exchange for assuming greater internal responsibility over acquired software.

— Warren Lyford DeLano, Drug Discovery Today v. 10, p. 213, 2005

Biography

• 1979 – Learns to hack on a TRS-80 Model I
• 1993 – Graduates Yale University with B.S. in Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry
• 1995 – Joins the department of Protein engineering at Genentech, Inc.
• 1998 – Joins in the launch of Sunesis Pharmaceuticals, Inc.
• 1999 – Graduates University of California, San Francisco, with Ph.D. in Biophysics
• 2000 – Published thesis research in Science^[3]
• 2000 – Releases PyMOL to the Internet
• 2003 – Launches DeLano Scientific LLC

References