In his 20-odd years as a science writer, Steve Nadis, (“Roboman,” p. 32) has seen meteor craters, strange deep-sea creatures, and intestine-crawling robots. But he wasn’t on top of the latest in genome technology until robotics wizard Kevin McKernan gave him a crash course at the Whitehead Institute. Nadis was a 1997-1998 Knight Science Journalism Fellow at MIT. His articles have appeared in Nature, Scientific American, Popular Science, Atlantic Monthly, and other magazines.