“Scientists are doing an awful lot of damage to the world in the name of helping it. I don’t mind attacking my own fraternity because I am ashamed of it.”
—Kary B. Mullis (1944-2019)
"Sometimes a good idea comes to you when you are not looking for it. Through an improbable combination of coincidence, naivete and lucky mistakes."
—Kary B. Mullis (1944-2019)
"Its not even probable, let alone scientifically proven, that HIV causes AIDS. If there is evidence that HIV causes AIDS, there should be scientific documents which either singly or collectively demonstrate that fact, at least with a high probability. There are no such documents."
—Kary B. Mullis (1944-2019)
Science, like nothing else among the institutions of mankind, grows like a weed every year. Art is subject to arbitrary fashion, religion is inwardly focused and driven only to sustain itself, law shuttles between freeing us and enslaving us."
—Kary B. Mullis (1944-2019)
"Global warmers predict that global warming is coming, and our emissions are to blame. They do that to keep us worried about our role in the whole thing. If we aren't worried and guilty, we might not pay their salaries. It's that simple."
—Kary B. Mullis (1944-2019)
"People don't realize that molecules themselves are somewhat hypothetical, and that their interactions are more so, and that the biological reactions are even more so."
—Kary B. Mullis (1944-2019)
"The mystery of that damn virus has been generated by the $2 billion a year they spend on it."
—Kary B. Mullis (1944-2019)
"You can't ask your pharmacist to stock larger quantities of potassium nitrate because you want to make a bigger rocket."
—Kary B. Mullis (1944-2019)
"Science has not been successful by making up explanations of things that fit with the current social fabric."
—Kary B. Mullis (1944-2019)
"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."
—Kary B. Mullis (1944-2019)
"Fish don't know much about water, and people didn't know much about air."
—Kary B. Mullis (1944-2019)
“The biggest battle I fought with the danger officer was over the fact that I insisted on keeping my lunch and a case of Beck’s beer in the same fridge in which I kept my radioactive isotopes.”
—Kary B. Mullis (1944-2019)
"I don’t think you can misuse PCR. [It is] the results; the interpretation of it. If they can find this virus in you at all – and with PCR, if you do it well, you can find almost anything in anybody.”
—Kary B. Mullis (1944-2019)
"It starts making you believe in the sort of Buddhist notion that everything is contained in everything else. If you can amplify one single molecule up to something you can really measure, which PCR can do, then there is just very few molecules that you don’t have at least one single one of in your body.”
—Kary B. Mullis (1944-2019)
"That could be thought of as a misuse: to claim that it [a PCR test] is meaningful. It tells you something about nature and what is there. To test for that one thing and say it has a special meaning is, I think, the problem. The measurement for it is not exact; it is not as good as the measurement for apples. The tests are based on things that are invisible and the results are inferred in a sense. It allows you to take a miniscule amount of anything and make it measureable and then talk about it.”
—Kary B. Mullis (1944-2019)
"PCR is just a process that allows you to make a whole lot of something out of something. It doesn’t tell you that you are sick, or that the thing that you ended up with was going to hurt you or anything like that.”
—Kary B. Mullis (1944-2019)
"I have never encountered a business person with any true interest in science. Why should he be interested? He had the choice, and he chose business. It is only through good fortune that money ends up in the hands of scientists, who know how to use it for anything other than making more money, and it is a sorry situation indeed, since much scientific research is not cheap."
—Kary B. Mullis (1944-2019)