ABOUT

Do you seek the Author?

It is in vain, for he is as hard to discover as the parents of the Popes were in the old times.

— John Donne, “The Printer to the Reader” (1616)

Author, Journalist

On the creative/general interest side I write novels, screenplays, essays and short fiction. My “Crazy Money” was published by a major New York publisher. My novels “I’m Still Here” and “They Don’t See You” were brought out by boutique houses. My short fiction and essays have come out in Threepenny Review, The Berkeley Monthly, The New York Times, East Bay Express, Catamaran and other journals.

On the sci-tech side I write and produce books, journal reports, proposals, news and feature articles, marketing materials, end-user documentation and online help. I can translate formal or esoteric language into plain English. I can synthesize disconnected data, notes and observations and present them in the required style and format of a publisher or agency. I’ve written features and reportage for Nature, Nature Medicine and other major publications, and white papers and reports for universities and corporations.

Editor

As a rewrite man and editor I’m the second set of eyes that even—especially!—experienced professional writers need to purge errors and provide balance and clarity in tone and content. Have a look at my writing.

Expertise

I’ve written in these medical specialties: immunology, toxicology, endocrinology, dermatology, psychiatry, pediatrics, oncology, cardiology, pulmonology, urology, laser medicine, surgery, pathology, pharmacology, clinical microbiology and medical equipment.

I’ve written in these life sciences specialties: genomics, proteomics & bioinformatics, molecular, cellular & structural biology, x-ray crystallography, protein engineering, drug discovery, combinatorial chemistry, biochemistry, genetics, neuroscience & signal processing and environmental microbiology.

I’ve written about mathematics, computer architectures, database formats, scientific software, and science policy issues.

My writing has been cited in the scientific press approximately 40 times.

Employment

  • Senior Editor, University of California, San Francisco
  • Communications Officer & Founding Director, Demeter Pharmaceuticals, a 501(c3) corporation
  • Tech Writer, Hitachi Software Engineering, San Bruno, Calif.
  • Tech Writer, Molecular Applications Group, Palo Alto, Calif.
  • Biology Instructor, Laney College, Oakland, Calif
  • Newsletter Publisher, Biotech Brief (2000-2015)
  • Contributing Writer, Nature, Nature Medicine, Dermatology Times, Modern Medicine, Science Digest, The Scientist, others

    Lab Skills

    • Animal cell culture
    • Karyotyping
    • Fluorescence microscopy
    • Liquid scintillation/quench curve
    • Immunoassay
    • Restriction mapping
    • Cloning into plasmids & lambda phage & screening/selection of transformed clones
    • Ames test
    • Bacterial/fungal strain characterization
    • Biochemistry of iron
    • Collection management
    • Phage plaque assay & deletion mapping
    • PCR, Sanger sequencing, cycle sequencing
    • Southern blot, Northern blot
    • Western blot, SDS-PAGE (silver stain)
    • Chromatography (HPLC isocratic & gradient columns)
    • Gel filtration, affinity column
    • Dialysis, salting in/out
    • Edman degradation
    • Fiske-Subbarow phosphate assay
    • Bradford protein assay
    • Lowry protein assay
    • Enzyme kinetics (linear & non-linear regression) & calculation of enzyme specific activity
    • Apparatus fabrication

    Biochem/molecular biology computer apps

    • ChemDraw
    • NIH Image
    • RasMol
    • Hitachi DNASIS suite
    • Wisconsin GCG
    • BLAST

    Education

    • University of California, Berkeley, BA (English), 1980
    • San Francisco State University, MS (Cell & Molecular Biology), 1993; Chemistry 343, Biochem Lab, 2002
    • Laney College (Oakland, CA), 1994 Instructor, biology majors course
    • UC Berkeley Extension 1998: Architecture of Information
    • Stanford University, 1999: Biochem 218, Computational Molecular Biology
    • College of Marin (Kentfield, CA), 2000: Java Programming, C Programming; 2001: Math 115, Statistics;2002 Biology, Entomology

    Honors

    • Ocean Science Media Fellow, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute, Woods Hole, MA, 2004
    • CASE Media Fellow, UCLA Neuropsychiatric Institute, Los Angeles, 2004
    • First prize winner, symposium paper “Electrolytic apparatus for enhanced growth of Thiobacillus ferrooxidans” Society for Industrial Microbiology, Spring Symposium, Oakland, CA, 1991

    Languages

    Read, write & speak Spanish

    Affiliations

    “The true alchemists do not change lead into gold; they change the world into words.”

    ~ William H. Gass