Eric McNatt is the son of a marine biologist, so he felt at home taking photographs in the laboratory of neurobiologist Eric Kandel (The Discover Interview, page 58), whose Nobel Prize–winning research on memory involved analyzing the brains of sea slugs. "I love going into a scientist's working space," says McNatt. His primary assignment was to do a revealing portrait of Kandel, but he also photographed a diminutive subject of Kandel's recent experiments: a mouse. "That was essentially my first animal portrait," he says. McNatt's portraits of humans, including music greats like the White Stripes and Moby, have appeared in Wired, Spin, Interview, and Newsweek.
Bruno Maddox has enjoyed a long and tangential relationship with the world of science. As the son of former Nature editor Sir John Maddox, young Bruno sat through dinners with such éminences grises as James Watson and Sir Fred Hoyle and once accepted the charges on a collect call from a hysterical Russian scientist who claimed to have invented a perpetual motion machine. Maddox retreated to the humanities during his school days in London and eventually fled to New York to edit Spy magazine. For the debut of his monthly column, Blinded by Science (page 30), Maddox laments the passing of the telegraph, the spiritual ancestor of the Internet.
Robert Sapolsky is a professor of biology, neurology, and neurological sciences at Stanford University, a research associate with the Institute of Primate Research in Kenya, and the recipient of a MacArthur award. The recent decoding of the chimp genome prompted him to ruminate on what distinguishes us from our closest primate relatives, considering we share all but 2 percent of our genes ("The 2% Difference," page 42). "The 2 percent didn't turn up any fundamental brain genes," says Sapolsky. "What makes us different is just that we have more brain cells, which really isn't different after all." Sapolsky's latest book, a collection of essays about our lives as animals, is MonkeyLuv (Scribner, 2005).
Jaron Lanier, a founding father of virtual reality research, will end his decades-long stint as a degreeless genius when he receives an honorary Ph.D. next month from the New Jersey Institute of Technology. Lanier is a polymath—inventor, consultant, musician, andartist—who mainly thinks of himself as an eccentric computer scientist. "Some of the most interesting scientists are finding new uses for computers in their quest to understand aspects of nature," he says. In the first installment of his monthly column, Jaron's World (page 26), Lanier explores what research into cephalopod intelligence reveals about the future of human communication.
Dean Kaufman recently began learning about alternative energy—"just for my own personal interest," he says—when Discover asked him to photograph a plant in Carthage, Missouri, that turns turkey guts into Texas crude ("Anything Into Oil," page 46). Many of the plant employees Kaufman met were farmers forced to change careers because of the economy, and he was surprised at their enthusiasm for the new work. "It's not the best-smelling place," he says. "But every person I spoke with was excited about turning waste into fuel." Kaufman's photos have also appeared in The New York Times Magazine, W, and Dwell.
