About

I’ve had a long strange trip to becoming an author. Much of what I write about comes from personal experience or out of my family background, which is an interesting one to say the least. I can trace my mixed ancestry to Blackfoot Indians, Prussian hop farmers, African slaves and General Stonewall Jackson, among others. How’s that for all mixed up? I was born and raised in Seattle, Washington, the first few years spent in a housing project near the Duwamish River in a place called South Park, not far from Boeing’s aircraft assembly plants. I was an underachiever at West Seattle High School and the University of Washington but pulled off a perfect score on the Biology Section of the Graduate Record Exam and squeaked into the Biochemistry Ph.D. program at Cornell University Medical College on Manhattan Island. In between bouts of bar hopping and hell raising in Fun City I managed to get in some time studying protein chemistry and eventually got my doctor’s degree. After that I tried some genetic engineering and peptide chemistry in a couple of Nobel Prize winning labs at Rockefeller University but decided to move home to Seattle and help found the multi-billion-dollar biotechnology company, Immunex Corporation. While there I cloned and patented some human immune system hormone genes and produced the first commercially successful nanotechnology device, a molecular handle I named the FLAG. It’s one of the most popular biotechnology techniques and has been used by thousands of genetic engineers to study virtually every major disease and so many microbes, organisms and biological molecules that it would be impossible to list them.

I currently fill the role of Vice President, Research and Development with CG Therapeutics, Inc. of Seattle, a small biotechnology company dedicated to developing vaccines against cancer and other diseases.

While I’m at it, I might as well mention that I play guitar and bass and have performed onstage with the likes of blues legend John Lee Hooker and rock supergroups The Kingsmen and The Drifters. My current band is The Beaters.