Michael Ashburner. 23 May 1942—7 July 2023

Michael Ashburner had an extraordinary career. From his early passion for natural history, through his education and subsequent career at the University of Cambridge, Michael’s intellectual energy and boundless curiosity generated a prodigious output of published works. His initial research focused on a systematic analysis of chromosome puffing in Drosophila , later shown to reflect gene regulation in response to hormone and environmental stimuli. Michael built an international reputation for his scholarship and knowledge of the Drosophila literature. His work on the fly Alcohol dehydrogenase gene and surrounding chromosome provided the best genetically characterized section of any metazoan genome when whole-genome sequencing emerged. Recognizing the shift in the scale of modern biology emerging from the advances in genome sequencing, Michael was a key figure in the development of databases and gene/genome annotation projects, notably FlyBase and the Gene Ontology database. He co-led EMBL-EBI for several years and was instrumental in promoting the understanding of biology through computational methods. By the end of his career Michael’s impact on genome biology extended across all species and the full breadth of biological and life science research. Michael’s impact on his students and the visitors to his laboratory, as well as the numerous colleagues worldwide with whom he collaborated, will ensure that his principles of excellence, persistence, rigour and openness will be his legacy.