My life began on December 8th, 1966. I was born in Elkhorn, Wisconsin to Clarence and Margery Ganser. My younger brother is Steven. He has a car dealership in Madison, Wisconsin, on the beltline. It is called Mad City Sales. My father worked at the Chrysler Assembly plant in Belvidere, Illinois for thirty years. He is now retired. My mother was a tremendously active woman. She was called at various times, the strawberry lady, the rabbit lady and the paper lady. She raised a half acre of strawberries for people to pick, raised rabbits and was a leader in the local 4-H club, and delivered a number of different papers. She also loved horses. My father always aspired to be a farmer, but the dream eluded him.
As for me, I loved science. I couldn't get enough. My first passion was for the stars, and so I studies astronomy. There was a local observatory at Williams Bay, which is called Yerkes observatory. It fascinated me. It was the largest refracting telescope in the world at one time. However, I moved on to the biological sciences. After graduating from St. Norbert College, in Des Pere, Wisconsin with a double major in mathematics and chemistry, I entered the Navy. That didn't last long. I was discharged shortly after my college graduation date for having a medical condition with my knees.
A strange turn of events occurred then. My professors at St. Norbert wondered why I wasn't going to graduate school, but had turned to them for recommendations for a job. Well, I hadn't taken any of the graduate school entrance exams, for I fully expected to be serving in the Navy, and the school semesters had already begun. They told me to hang tight, and they would see what they could do. I ended up taking the exams after getting into graduate school. Those professors of mine really came through for me. I was accepted at three different programs, without any exams. In fact, I got a pretty lucrative scholarship.
I received a master's in Synthetic Organic Chemistry from Dartmouth College in 1992. Then, I went on to develop some controlled release formulations for levothyroxin at Enzytech in Cambridge, Massachusetts. That was a fabulous job! Oh, if only science would continuously be fun like that. We had a young group, who were smart and talented. We didn't suffer the bureaucracy and politics of a large pharmaceutical company. The emphasis was on getting the job done, and the personal interactions were fantastic. I miss that.
I went on to Abbott laboratories
