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degree (1964) from John Hopkins University (MD), then Ph. D. in biochemistry in 1968.

1975 Professor of Biology at Caltech, 1989 Director of the NSF Science and Technology

Center for Molecular Biotechnology at the National Science Foundation (NSF), 1992

Professor University of Washington. Since 1999, Hood has directed the Institute for

Systems Biology. His merits lie in particular in his work on the automation of DNA

sequencing (see Automated Sequencing) and on the diversity of possible antibodies of an

individual through recombination of genetic information (see V[D]J recombination).

This short selection of papers shows that Leroy Hood cares a lot about molecular medi­

cine (Qin et al. 2016), personalized medicine (Sagner et al. 2016), systematic proteomics

(Kusebauch et al. 2016), and Big Data analysis (Toga et al. 2015).

Reinhart Heinrich

Reinhart Heinrich was an East German biophysicist, born in Dresden on April 24, 1946,

died in Berlin on October 23, 2006. He first lived with his parents in Kuibyshev in the

Soviet Union, received his doctorate in 1971 on solid state physics, B doctorate in 1977

(then habilitation), lecturer in 1979 and worked as a professor of biophysics at Humboldt

University from 1993. He is one of the pioneers of systems biology. His contributions to

metabolic control theory, which date back to the 1970s, are exciting and instructive.

Fundamental works appeared together with Tom Rapoport. His theoretically elegant and

impressive works on regulation (Schuster and Heinrich: The Regulation of Cellular

Systems. Springer Verlag New York, 1996) and signal cascades (Heinrich et al. 2002). In

particular, he succeeded in defining more precisely general properties of phosphatases and

kinases for signal processing. This concerns phosphatases for the regulation of signal

amplitude, signal frequency, signal duration (the phosphatase must switch off fast enough

for both) and kinases for the regulation of signal amplitude and signal height (the kinase

must amplify strongly enough). His work has influenced a number of German systems

biologists in their school days (e.g. Edda Klipp, Stefan Schuster, Thomas Höfer) and even

more bioinformaticians.

Comparable work with different terminology has been done by Henrik Kacser and Jim

Burns at the University of Edinburgh. This also applies, for example also to German

research personalities such as Jens Reich (emeritus group leader at the Max Delbrück

Center for Molecular Medicine Berlin; member of the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of

Sciences), Peer Bork (EMBL in Heidelberg, internationally perhaps the best-known

German bioinformatician, many strong publications on genomics, metagenomics; Nature

Mentoring Award), Thomas Lengauer (MPI for Informatics Saarbrücken, member of the

presidium of the Leopoldina) and Martin Vingron (MPI for Molecular Genetics Berlin,

member of the Leopoldina). In addition, there would be a long list of bioinformatician

friends in Berlin, Bielefeld, Dortmund, Freiburg, Greifswald, Hamburg, Jena, Heidelberg,

Mainz, Munich, Tübingen etc. (in alphabetical order of cities). (alphabetical order of cit­

ies) and elsewhere. For each of them, I can only stress that the high quality of all these

contributions only becomes fully apparent when you really get to grips with the individ­

ual papers.

9  Complex Systems Behave Fundamentally in a Similar Way