Laszlo Patthy is the head of the Extracellular Proteolysis Group of the Institute of Enzymology, Budapest. In the last twenty-five years the main area of his experimental research has been the molecular biology, structure, function, and evolution of multidomain protein components of extracellular proteolytic systems of vertebrates. He is the author of Protein Evolution by Exon-shuffling (1995) and Protein Evolution (Blackwell, 1999).