In his first decade as an entrepreneur, Marshall Rauch built a profitable small business producing crochet thread and kite string at a factory near Gastonia, N.C. He had a few dozen employees ...

Transplanted from New York to North Carolina, his company would eventually make more than a million ornaments a day.

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He then moved for a second postdoc to the laboratory of Michael Knop at the University of Heidelberg (Germany), where he focused on microbial mating and recombination strategies and their impact on ...