Kenneth Goetz’s first nineteen years were spent rambling through parts of South Dakota, a time when he and his three younger siblings lost both of their parents. Those bittersweet years are recounted in his memoir, Bending the Twig. He enlisted in the U.S. Air Force at age 19, attended weather school, and spent three years observing German weather while inching toward maturity. He then enrolled in pre-journalism at the University of Wisconsin in Madison and did what his advisor assured him had never been done by any student in the journalism school; he took physics as an elective. Having never been exposed to physics, and more critically to chemistry, he found the first weeks of the course to be stressfully interesting, even as he discovered he was doing much better than most of his classmates, a large percentage of whom were pre-medical students. This caused him to ditch journalism for medicine and major in economics while completing his premedical requirements. He enrolled in the UW medical school where, after an impressive start (despite working 20 hours each week in the genetics department), he tired of the dreary memorization required and coasted through his first year courses with mediocre grades. He split his second year of medical school with graduate school, and then opted to forego his last two years of med school and finish his PhD, after which he was offered a position in the physiology department at the University of Kansas medical school, where he taught and finished his last two years of medical school. He took his medical internship at St. Luke’s Hospital of Kansas City and afterward stayed at the hospital to establish a division of experimental medicine, which he headed for twenty years, spearheading investigations of cardiovascular and endocrine physiology. After leaving St. Luke’s, he accepted a visiting professorship at the University of Kuopio, Finland, and soon afterward received a German Humboldt award that supported his visiting professorships at the University of Munich and the Institute of Aerospace Medicine in Cologne. His professional activities provided the essential medical and scientific background for his novel, The Colors of Medicine.
Kenneth lives in the Kansas City area. He is the father of Greg, whose family lives near him, and Anne, whose family lives in Chicago.