The Boss: On the Discovery Trail
October 12, 2009 by admin
Filed under Career News and Advice
I KNEW that I wanted to be a chemist by the time I was 8. Both of my parents were chemists.
JOHN C. MARTIN
Chief executive, Gilead Sciences, Foster City, Calif.
AGE 58
BIRTHPLACE Easton, Pa.
FAVORITE SPORTS Football and basketball
When I was 2, my father took a job at Mead Johnson in Evansville, Ind. Our house there was an old farmhouse. Our neighbors had a barn, and friends and I strung an incandescent light suspended from the rafters so we could play basketball every night. Evansville was a sports-crazy town. Everyone turned out for sports on Friday night.
My first job, at age 8, was picking strawberries at a neighboring farm. We planted our own crops, too, including corn every three weeks in the spring. We had an acre of potatoes, lettuce and tomatoes and a half-acre of berries.
I majored in chemical engineering at Purdue, where you could test out of college courses and get credit. I accumulated enough credits to graduate in two and a half years, but I stayed for the full four. The first semester I enrolled in two calculus courses and two chemistry courses. …
Read the original article at NYTimes
