Dr. Donald Lindberg, 85, Dies

Announcements
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Friends,

I am sad to report that Dr. Donald Lindberg, past Director of the National Library of Medicine, has passed away. Dr. Lindberg was an exceptional visionary who saw the need for computers in medicine many years ago.

Among his many accomplishments, Dr, Lindberg funded the Visible Human Project and the development of ITK, CMake, Cable and Dart (CDash) efforts. He was an advocate of open source and open science. I was fortunate enough to have talked before his NLM Board of Regents in February 2002 about the status of ITK. He was impressed with the software but especially impressed that we were able as a community to create such large systems. In 2014, he invited me to speak at ā€œNLM: The National Library of Medicine, 1984-Ā­2014: Voyaging to the Futureā€, which was a tribute to his accomplishments at NLM.

Here is a link to that symposium.

We lost a great leader, a great man and visionary. I hope the next time you use ITK or CMake that you take a moment to thank him.

Here is his obituary.

Bill

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Thank you Bill for sharing this. Visionaries like him are essential for aligning interests, needs, and capabilities of various groups to make them all work towards the same goals, create communities, and achieve great things.

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Thanks for sharing Bill.

Quite impressive how widespread the positive impacts of his efforts have reached.