Chris Pohl:  

Life I grew up in Kennydale. I decided I was going to be a chemist when I was in the 7th grade (thanks to my Science teacher that year, Mrs. Konarsky). I never gave up on that decision and went through Junior High School and High School, the quintessential nerd, wearing floods and horn-rimmed glasses and without many friends. I graduated from Renton High in 1969 and went on to get a BS in Chemistry at the UW, graduating in 1973. While at the UW, I took part in a number of anti-war protests. I will always remember marching down I-5 toward downtown Seattle with freeway traffic stopped to protest the arrest of the Chicago 7 in front of the Federal Building, only to be chased off by a bunch of Seattle cops who were out of uniform but somehow forgot to leave their riot-sticks in their locker when they got off work. I moved to San Francisco, CA with my girlfriend at the time in June of 1973 because the job market in the Seattle area in 1973 was terrible. I had visited San Francisco several times while at the UW and had decided that California was for me. In the fall of 1973, I got a technician job at Chevron Chemical in Richmond, CA working in the pilot plant and later in the analytical lab. Since to be a chemist at Chevron required a Ph.D. which I didn't have, I began looking for other opportunities and in 1976 found a job as a chemist at Clorox in the R&D center in Pleasanton, CA. There I worked on competitive product analysis in an analytical lab. While there I came up with my first patentable idea (a new way to analyze ions in...Expand for more