Allow me to introduce myself by way of a homecoming.

It was at Discover that I started writing about science, a couple years out of college and with no clear idea of what I was going to do. My first two articles came out in the same issue in November 1989. One was illustrated with a picture of E. coli colonies, each glowing its own color of the rainbow. The story described the work of a scientist named Keith Wood, who had isolated the gene fireflies use to glow in 1984, and who went on two isolate genes for other colors from Jamaican beetles. The other story described a hybrid underground of poets and novelists who were just starting to