Twenty years ago the Beckman Institute opened on the campus of the University of Illinois and the Theoretical and Computational Biophysics Group (TCBG) was the first to move into the beautiful new building. The group advanced computational biology through widely used software and exciting discoveries (some recently described here). Hence, it was time to celebrate and so TCBG did with the symposium Computational Biology of the Cell - The Next Decade. But rather than looking backward, the symposium glanced into the future that promises as many great opportunities as the last two decades realized: computational power for millisecond atomic resolution simulations, coarse-graining methods to describe true cellular size and times scales, better force fields, closer collaboration with experiment, and partnership with nanotechnology. Bringing together many of today's leading thinkers and practitioners of biomolecular modeling lectures led to lively debates (see some photos) regarding computational biology's future. On TCBG's past and future read more here.