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
It's not blaming the victim. It's not anybody's fault. They just did something that didn't work, that's all.
People say to me, How many people have you seen die of this disease? They say, You don't know what causes it because you've never watched them die.
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.
Somebody is dying of anthrax and would like to be immune right now,
I hate this kind of crap. I'd like to write about something that's easy to write about, where you don't have to come up with a conclusion in the end.
PCR made it easier to see that certain people are infected with HIV.
Natural DNA is a tractless coil, like an unwound and tangled audiotape on the floor of the car in the dark.
Do we care about these people that are HIV-positive whose lives have been ruined? Those are the people I'm the most concerned about. Every night I think about this.
You make observations, write theories to fit them, try experiments to disprove the theories and, if you can't, you've got something.
Here's a bunch of people practising a new set of behavioural norms. Apparently it didn't work because a lot of them got sick. That's the conclusion. You don't necessarily know why it happened. But you start there.
My grandfather milked several cows twice a day and supplied the neighbours with dairy products. He liked to go visiting around the county on Saturdays, and he also enjoyed the neighbours when they came by once a week with their empty milk jars. He walked them out to their cars and hung over the driver's side window until they drove off.
Until I was five, my immediate family lived near my grandfather's farm where my mother had grown up and, with the exception of a few modern conveniences, had not changed a lot over the years.
My mother often mailed me articles from 'Reader's Digest' about advances in DNA chemistry. No matter how I tried to explain it to her, she never grasped the concept that I could have been writing those articles, that something I had invented made most of those DNA discoveries possible.
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.