Research on interactive three-dimensional molecular graphics began more than 30 years ago, on the unique Project MAC display at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, by the late Cyrus Levinthal (then at MIT) and myself (then at Harvard University). In 1967-69, as commercial devices became available, the Division of Research Resources of the National Institutes of Health encouraged both Levinthal and me to establish computer graphics laboratories at Columbia and Princeton universities, respectively.
Although protein crystallographers fitting electron densities are heavy users of FRODO, mentioned later in the article, this was by no means the pioneering development in interactive molecular graphics, which has a much broader application in structural biology and drug design. All the programs since developed, including FRODO, trace their origins not to the last decade but to the pioneering work at MIT that began in 1964.
