A lungful of hydrogen sulfide nearly killed John Burba a few months into his first job in the West Texas oil patch. He’d grown up in the region, where his dad worked for Gulf Oil as a drilling superintendent. The encounter with the toxic gas left him with headaches for the better part of a year. Afterward, even though he’d previously been an uninspired student, he concluded, “Maybe it’s not such a bad idea to go to college after all.”He headed to Waco, leaving Baylor University nine years later with a doctorate in chemistry and a nascent family. His new wife, Carol, who’d also studied chemistry at Baylor, was pregnant, so he dropped his plans for further studies and went to work for a global…