Francis Crick, the co-discoverer of the structure of DNA in 1953, passed away on July 28. He was 88. A minute of silence in Crick’s honor was observed at ISMB 2004 prior to kicking off the conference on July 31. Janet Thornton, director of the European Bioinformatics Institute, delivered a brief eulogy, noting that is “particularly appropriate” for computational biologists to acknowledge Crick’s contributions to the field of molecular biology because he and James Watson “took information from many different sources” to model the structure of DNA.