M. Mitchell Waldrop earned a Ph.D. in elementary particle physics at the University of Wisconsin in 1975, and a master's in journalism at Wisconsin in 1977. From 1977 to 1980, he was a writer and West Coast bureau chief for Chemical and Engineering News. From 1980 to 1991, he served as a senior writer at Science magazine, where he covered physics, space, astronomy, computer science, artificial intelligence, molecular biology, psychology, and neuroscience. He is the author of Man-Made Minds (1987), a book about artificial intelligence, and Complexity (1992), a book about the Santa Fe Institute and the new sciences of complexity. He lives in Washington, D.C., with his wife, Amy E. Friedlander, and their dog, Betsy.