Fame is a bubble, but not for some Gregory A Petsko

The death of Francis Crick, who succumbed to colon cancer on 28 July at the age of 88, does more than mark the end of one of the most distinguished, and influential, scientific careers of the last century. It also helps mark the end of an era: the remarkable era when biology was transformed from a descriptive, largely organism-based science into a molecular one. Now we are living through another period of transformation, as genomics allied with molecular biology changes the subject into one that is more quantitative, more dependent on computational and engineering tools -...