Charles Cooney was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and attended Upper Darby High School. Growing up, he would often play with electronics, inspired by his father who was a systems analyst for General Electric. After…

Annette Campbell-White was born and raised in New Zealand, but due to her father’s job as a mining engineer, she attended university in South Africa. She studied engineering, but not seeing a career path in the…

Dennis Fenton was born and raised in Mineola on Long Island, New York. He attended Manhattan College in the Bronx and later received his PhD in microbiology from Rutgers University in 1977. Motivated by his father’s…

Robert Kamen was born in Brooklyn, New York, but raised in Queens. His father was a stockbroker, and his mother was an author and homemaker. Kamen was interested in science from an early age, working in a lab cleaning…

Peter Meldrum was born in Salt Lake City, Utah. He attended the University of Utah, where he received his bachelor’s in chemical engineering. After graduating, Meldrum joined the army, where he was a lieutenant in the…

Joseph Panetta was raised in Syracuse, New York, where he attended Le Moyne College for his undergraduate degree. While he originally wanted to attend medical school, he opted to join the work force instead and began…

Alison Taunton-Rigby was born and educated in Great Britain. Her father was a scientist for the British government and her mother was a physiotherapist. She attended the University of Bristol for her undergraduate and…

Andrew Barnes was born in the northern suburbs of Chicago, Illinois. His father was a chemical engineer at Abbott Laboratories, which inspired him to pursue a chemical engineering degree from Purdue University. While…

Cam Garner grew up in Virginia Beach, Virginia. His father was diagnosed with cancer when Garner was a child, and later died when he was seventeen years old. Garner struggled academically in grade school, though became…

Steve Duzan was born in Oregon in 1941, though he and his family moved to Seattle, Washington when he was ten years old. He was raised by a single mother after the death of his father. His mother worked as the assistant…

Peter Drake was born in St. Louis, Missouri. His father was the head of manufacturing for Beech Aircraft before he became one of the founders of McDonnell Aircraft. Drake attended Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine,…

Carlo Croce was born in Milan, Italy and studied medicine at the Sapienza University of Rome. While he initially came to the United States to do medicine at Scripps Clinic and Research Foundation, he ultimately worked…

Thomas Wiggans grew up in Fredonia, Kansas, a small town with just a few thousand residents. Both his grandfather and father ran a local drugstore, which Wiggans worked in during his adolescence. This led to Wiggans not…

Garren Bohlin was a partner at Arthur Anderson LLP in 1980, where he did general business consulting. He was contacted by Mirza Mehdi of the Genetics Institute, who worked with Gabriel Schmergel. Mehdi asked Bohlin if…

Robert Carpenter was born in San Diego, California, in 1945. He moved to South Bend, Indiana, where his father started a family bakery when he was an infant. When Carpenter was in elementary school, the family moved to…

Gabriel Schmergel was born in 1940 in Budapest, Hungary. He immigrated to the United States at the age of sixteen shortly after the Soviet Union defeated the Hungarian Revolution of 1956. His parents worked manual labor…

Helen Donis-Keller was born in Madison, Wisconsin, but grew up in Elkhart, Indiana. As a child, she loved art, so she pursued a degree in graphic design and photography at The University of Cincinnati. She spent two…

Constantine E. Anagnostopoulos was born in Turkey in 1922 to parents of Greek descent. Due to Turkish expulsion of the Greeks when he was three months old, the family left for the Greek mainland. Because his father was…

David Pyott was raised in India and Scotland. An early love of languages led him to work and study in mainland Europe, while pursuing a BA in German language and literature at the University of Edinburgh. Later, he…

Henri Termeer begins his interview by discussing his parents’ histories, the influence of family, and his entrance into the business world. He describes how, as a boy, he began to develop leadership skills as early as…