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Kary Banks Mullis (born December 28, 1944) is a biochemist. In the 1980s, he invented the polymerase chain reaction (PCR), a central technique in molecular biology which allows the amplification of specified DNA sequences.
He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry and the Japan Prize for this work in 1993.
Mullis was born in North Carolina, and grew up in Columbia, South Carolina. He attended the Georgia Institute of Technology, and received a PhD in biochemistry from the University of California, Berkeley in 1973.
He has been married four times (including his current marriage), and has two sons and one daughter. He is the founder of the company Altermune, LLC.
Idiosyncratic views
Mullis holds several highly idiosyncratic views. In his 1998 essay collection Dancing Naked in the Mind Field he relates experiences that he attributes to space alien visitors. (Actually, he says it is similiar in form to such experiences; he doesn't claim it's aliens. He was walking alone at night, he encountered a talking racoon, and then lost all memory of what happened the next 5 hours.) He also claims that the evidence behind astrology has not been adequately appreciated. For those who do appreciate it, let us quote his book: "I was born at 17:38 Greenwich Mean Time on December 28, 1944 in Lenoir, North Carolina. You can find out more about me from that than you can from reading this book." He had a weird experience that he gives a parapsychological explanation.
Kary Mullis is among a scientific minority that claims that there is no sufficient evidence for stating that HIV causes AIDS (see AIDS reappraisal).
He has also advocated that concentrations be measured in "number of things per milliliter" instead of "moles per milliliter" because of the arbitrariness of Avogadro's number. (This is inaccurate; the essay really is about thinking outside convention, where conventionally different types of chemicals had different concentration scales, like "activity" for enzymes.) He denigrates the hysteria about global warming, denying that it is human caused, and he believes we are more likely entering an ice age.
Mullis, according to the above mentioned essay collection, has been at various times an avid surfer and drug-user. (Nitrous oxide, marijuana, DET, LSD (before it was illegal)) He currently resides in Newport Beach, California and in Anderson Valley, California.
If it seems the above emphasises the idiosyncratic, it is only because his book does likewise. The main theme is the quest to escape mental ruts.
Related articles
Quotes
- "We tortured the cows. We sliced apples and slipped them onto the electric fence that contained them in the newer parts of the pasture." (from his Nobel Prize autobiography, about his youth)
External links and references
- Official autobiography (http://www.nobel.se/chemistry/laureates/1993/mullis-autobio.html) from the Nobel Foundation website
- Kary Mullis: Dancing Naked in the Mind Field, Pantheon Books, New York, 1998
- Anthony Liversidge: "Kary Mullis, the great gene machine (http://www.omnimag.com/archives/interviews/mullis.html)", Omni magazine, April 1992,
- Celia Farber: "Interview Kary Mullis (http://www.virusmyth.net/aids/data/cfmullis.htm)", Spin July 1994. Focuses on his position regarding HIV and AIDS.
- Personal website (http://www.karymullis.com/)
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