[1][2][3][4] Ralph Larsen was born in Brooklyn, New York City in a family of five siblings in 1938.
He worked his way through college, taking electrical jobs, and he received a Bachelor of Business Administration from Hofstra University in 1962.
[9] In 1998 dozens of federal agents raided the headquarters of Johnson & Johnson's LifeScan unit after it failed to notify the Food and Drug Administration of a software glitch in a diabetes diagnostic device that it manufactured.
In 2000 LifeScan pleaded guilty to criminal charges and agreed to pay $60 million in fines for selling defective monitoring devices.
“Mistakes and misjudgments were made,” Larsen wrote in a statement of apology at the time.