Eric Davidson. A genomic control odyssey

Abstract

While writing this article, I came to realize that it is utterly impossible to capture the spirit, scientific contributions, or colorful personality of Eric Davidson in a few pages, or even a whole journal, and so I won't even try. I would nevertheless like to pay tribute to an enormously powerful mind and a great intellectual partner and friend, with whom I worked very closely over the last almost nine years, and I will do so in two ways. On the one hand, I will give a brief and entirely subjective account of what I would regard as the most profound expression of his scientific intellect, which is his lifelong journey to understand the genomic control of development. On the other hand, I will remember Eric's very expressive personality in the form of but a few examples of our interactions. What impressed me most about Eric's spirit, of which I am reminded by the photograph in Fig. 1, is that despite the incredible amount of his achievements, Eric never stopped until his very last day to think about what lays ahead, driven by immense curiosity and a deep desire to understand the natural world around us.