Dear Colleagues: Is is with great sadness that I report the recent passing of Abraham Szöke, a friend, colleague, informal mentor, and an exceptionally intelligent and energetic source of boundless intellectual enthusiasm.
Abraham was a physicist at Livermore who helped to design nuclear weapons for a living, but he had many other interests. One of these was X-ray crystallography, and with his wife and collaborator Hanna Szöke, as well as John Somoza, he developed an approach to crystallographic real-space electron-density refinement and optimization, implemented in a program called EDEN, that produces electron density maps with minimal model bias in a robust manner. The source code, along with a brief explanation and extensive user's manual, is freely available: https://code.google.com/archive/p/edencrystallography/ https://github.com/wgscott/edencrystallography EDEN is written in C and is easy to compile on any unix platform. A fink package for OS X is also available, as are packages for various linux distributions. John and I first met Abraham and Hanna Szöke when we were graduate students at Berkeley. A few years later, I had the opportunity to collaborate with them and to put EDEN to the test. A single-particle version of EDEN was also under development, for use with electron microscopy. Abraham had a wide variety of interests in addition to electron density reconstruction, including many novel ideas about the origin of life. He enjoyed a multitude of fruitful and productive collaborations throughout a period most normal people would consider retirement. He passed away on Thursday at age 87 from an opportunistic infection while combatting lymphoma. William G. Scott Professor, Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry and The Center for the Molecular Biology of RNA University of California at Santa Cruz Santa Cruz, California 95064 USA http://scottlab.ucsc.edu
