The Informant!2009

Mark Whitacre:
I read this study in Time magazine when I was at Cornell, which is an Ivy League school, and there were people, including my mother, who never believed I would make it into an Ivy League school. Maybe Ginger, who I met in marching in the eighth grade. And the study said people had nice, sympathetic feelings about people who were adopted, and treated them better. So I made up this adoption story, and people *did* treat me better. And when I got a job, one of my professors told people at Ralston Purina that I was this amazing guy that had accomplished all this in spite of being adopted. And so it was really *other* people who spread the story, not me. Although I admit it was wrong to start it and everything, it was other people who kept it going, even the people at ADM.