Abstract

Eric Davidson was a legend both in his science and his personality. He inspired and challenged a new generation of developmental biologists and I was lucky to be one of them. He changed the way we think about biological interactions by synthesizing a large scale, almost incomprehensible set of data into a causal model of a gene regulatory network. While his death leaves a big hole in our lives, his contribution to the conceptualization of regulatory biology will inspire developmental and evolutionary biologists for decades to come.