The Lure of the Sandbox
A little over a decade ago, Paul Emsley, biochemistry professor at the University of Oxford, was looking to ditch his white coat. What he really wanted was to spend more time programming in the computer lab. “I was happy using existing software tools,” said Emsley, who had used O and other tools in his research. “But you go down the pub and think, if only the tool did this, and if only it did that. That festered for years.”
In the late 1990s, Emsley had the opportunity to join the lab of Kevin Cowtan at University of York with the task of implementing software to perform crystallographic “ridge line tracing” in three dimensions, a concept first imagined in the 1970s by Johnathan Greer, now Director of Structural Biology ...
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