The Boss: On the Discovery Trail

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

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