When Meredith Salisbury (“Tools or Targets? p. 24) interviewed to be associate editor of this magazine, she was still mispronouncing “genomics,” but her interest in writing about medicine and science was obvious. (So was her interest in hot-air ballooning, but so far she hasn’t received any job offers for that.) Before joining Genome Technology, Salisbury worked as a researcher at Newsweek.
After dropping out of college, Dennis Waters (“Parsing Portfolios on the Buy Side,” p. 30) became a broadcaster, ending up as program director of a jazz FM station in New York. He returned to academia, studying theoretical biology with Howard Pattee at the Watson School at SUNY Binghamton, and earned a PhD. Meanwhile, he started a publishing business focused on information and technology on Wall Street. After reading David Searls’s paper in Larry Hunter’s book, he got excited about bioinformatics and in 1997 began publishing the BioInform newsletter. Last year he raided his children’s college fund to help finance the magazine you now hold.
Although trained as a chemical engineer, John S. MacNeil (“Just Say Weir,” p. 14) gave up his studies of zeolites to find satisfaction as a writer. Since earning a master’s degree, he has interned at the Richmond Times Dispatch, U.S. News and World Report, and Science. John is currently learning the dickens out of genomics as a reporter for GenomeWeb. In his spare time he likes to ogle Chevy Caprices and Ford Crown Victorias.