Kary Mullis
Kary Mullis
Kary Banks Mullisis a Nobel Prize-winning American biochemist, author, and lecturer. In recognition of his improvement of the polymerase chain reactiontechnique, he shared the 1993 Nobel Prize in Chemistry with Michael Smith and earned the Japan Prize in the same year. The process was first described by Kjell Kleppe and 1968 Nobel laureate H. Gobind Khorana, and allows the amplification of specific DNA sequences. The improvements made by Mullis allowed PCR to become a central technique in biochemistry and molecular...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionScientist
Date of Birth28 December 1944
CityLenoir, NC
CountryUnited States of America
My father, Cecil Banks Mullis, and mother, formerly Bernice Alberta Barker, grew up in rural North Carolina in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains. My dad's family had a general store, which I never saw. My grandparents on his side had already died before I started noticing things.
I went to high school in Columbia. I met my first wife, Richards, whom I married while I was working on a B.S. in chemistry at Georgia Tech. She bore Louise, and I studied. I learned most of the useful technical things - math, physics, chemistry - that I now use during those four years.
Religion is inwardly focused and driven only to sustain itself.
People realize this man knows what the hell's going on and nobody else does.
They can't pooh-pooh me now, because of who I am.
You don't discover the cause of something like AIDS by dealing with incredibly obscure things. You just look at what the hell is going on.
For the first time, our chemistry is sophisticated enough that we can take control of the machine that has been keeping us alive, the immune system,
I've been writing about my boyhood, when I was a little kid back on my grandfather's farm where we didn't know about black widow spiders or all that stuff. But writing about that is so easy.
In the 1950s in Columbia, South Carolina, it was considered OK for kids to play with weird things. We could go to the hardware store and buy 100 feet of dynamite fuse.
Science has not been successful by making up explanations of things that fit with the current social fabric.
If reincarnation is a useful biological idea it is certain that somewhere in the universe it will happen.
There are a lot of people for whom psychedelics have been really beneficial. But I wouldn't recommend it to everyone. Some are just not ready but society would benefit from letting people who are ready for psychedelics have legal acces to them.
We were fortunate to have the Russians as our childhood enemies. We practiced hiding under our desks in case they had the temerity to drop a nuclear weapon.
And all I knew about drugs was what I read in magazines like Time and Life. I learned that marijuana was a dangerous addictive drug and that I should stay away from it.