A Scientist Guerilla Fighter in the Frontiers of Bioinformatics—In Memory of Bailin Hao

The well-known physicist and bioinformaticist, Professor, Academician of Chinese Academy of Sciences (the Academy), and the former director of Institute of Theoretical Physics (the Institute; 1990–1994), Mr. Bailin Hao, passed away early this year (March 7, 2018). In the cover of this issue of Genomics, Proteomics & Bioinformatics (GPB), the Editorial Board has decided to publish his art-processed portrait in memory of our colleague (Prof. Hao had served on the Editorial Board of GPB during 2003–2015), friend, and one of the scientific giants we had worked closely with. Most importantly, we would like to take this opportunity to pay respect to him and his generation of scientists, who may have left us as biological beings, but their personal images, professional works, and scientific spirits will certainly be with us forever as heroes, heroines, and role models, especially for the younger generations who may or may not have known them personally. His much-loved wife, Mrs. Shuyu Zhang, in her recentlypublished book, Bailin Hao — A Scientist Guerilla Fighter [1], has so nicknamed Prof. Hao, guerilla fighter, referring to the fact that Prof. Hao had been shifting research focuses quite a few times in his over-60-year-long scientific career, under the name of the National Needs at different politicallyand economically-defined periods from 1950s to 2010s. He indeed had many research activities in various frontiers of scientific fields within the disciplines of physics, mathematics, statistics, and biology, and had published over 180 peer-reviewed papers, dozens of scientific books, and even more book chapters (including foreign-language translations), which are all closely related to his research interests. In fact, the official announcement accompanying his obituary from the Institute and the Academy has listed over ten such fields (http://www.cas.cn/ xb/gz/201803/t20180308_4637577.shtml). In addition, he was also a tireless fighter in popularizing sciences as he had written many books and book chapters, as well as articles and blogs, which are also counted by the hundreds in total and cover a broad range of scientific fields he had worked in, including the last one — bioinformatics [1]. Prof. Hao published about 50 peer-reviewed papers in this field, which mostly involve the development of algorithms, software tools, and web servers. His best-acknowledged contribution to the field is his genome sequence analysis tools and analyses for prokaryotic genomes, such as CVTree [2–7] (http://www.itp.ac.cn/~hao/). All his publications are thoroughly recorded in Mrs. Zhang’s book [1], except his latest article published in this issue, which he had been working on until this March [8]. We, who are younger than Prof. Hao’s generation of scientists, especially those of us who were born in the 1960s, 1970s, and after, may not understand fully why Prof. Hao called himself a guerilla fighter. The reasons were stated on the back cover of Mrs. Zhang’s book: ‘‘In the historical transition period, when China emerged from feudal backwardness and humiliations by foreign powers and began to march toward modernization, Bailin Hao belonged to the group who persisted in carrying on their work and struggling to do their best from the beginning to the end. On the one hand, they managed to achieve the best solutions