Leó Szilárd
EMBL was the idea of Leó Szilárd, James Watson and John Kendrew. Their goal was to create an international research centre, similar to CERN, to rival the strongly American-dominated field of molecular biology. Kendrew served as the first Director-general of EMBL until 1982 and was succeeded by Lennart Philipson. From 1993 to 2005, Fotis Kafatos, served as director and was succeeded by Iain Mattaj, EMBL's fourth director, from 2005 to 2018. In January 2019, Edith Heard became the fifth director of EMBL and the first woman to hold this position.