David Perlman is the San Francisco Chronicle‘s veteran science editor and reports on research and scientific advances at California universities and research centers. He has also reported from many places around America from Cape Canaveral to Alaska, and around the world from Antarctica to the Galapagos Islands and from China to Ethiopia. For many years he had a home in Squaw Valley and, along with Oakley Hall, Blair Fuller, Barnaby Conrad, and Walter Ballenger, was one of the original founding staff writers of the Community of Writers back in 1970.