Kary Mullis Quotations

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.

You can't ask your pharmacist to stock larger quantities of potassium nitrate because you want to make a bigger rocket.

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.

We are the recipients of scientific method. We can each be a creative and active part of it if we so desire.

My mother would give my brothers and me a pile of catalogues and let us pick what we wanted for Christmas.

I like writing about biology, not doing it.

If reincarnation is a useful biological idea it is certain that somewhere in the universe it will happen.

Science consistently produces a new crop of miraculous truths and dazzling devices every year.

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.

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.

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.

You make observations, write theories to fit them, try experiments to disprove the theories and, if you can't, you've got something.

Sometimes in the morning, when it's a good surf, I go out there, and I don't feel like it's a bad world.

It's not blaming the victim. It's not anybody's fault. They just did something that didn't work, that's all.

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.

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.

I can say exactly what I feel about any issue, and I'm going to do that.

I love a microphone and a big crowd; I'm an entertainer, I guess.

Law shuttles between freeing us and enslaving us.

Natural DNA is a tractless coil, like an unwound and tangled audiotape on the floor of the car in the dark.

PCR made it easier to see that certain people are infected with HIV.

Science has not been successful by making up explanations of things that fit with the current social fabric.

They can't pooh-pooh me now, because of who I am.

Each of us have things and thoughts and descriptions of an amazing universe in our possession that kings in the 17th Century would have gone to war to possess.

The horror of it is, every goddamn thing you look at seems pretty scary to me.

People realize this man knows what the hell's going on and nobody else does.

Religion is inwardly focused and driven only to sustain itself.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The mystery of that damn virus has been generated by the $2 billion a year they spend on it.

A lot of people studying this disease are looking for clever little pathways they can piece together that will show how this works.

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,

The immune system only works when you're prepared or when the thing that you've got takes a long time to develop,

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.

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.

I think I might have been stupid in some respects, it if weren't for my psychedelic experiences.

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.

Fish don't know much about water, and people didn't know much about air.

The mystery of that damn virus has been generated by the $2 billion a year they spend on it.

I'm really optimistic in the mornings.

I'm not driven by being understood.

I'm not politically correct.

Science grows like a weed every year.

There is a general place in your brain, I think, reserved for melancholy of relationships past. It grows and prospers as life progresses, forcing you finally, against your better judgment, to listen to country music.

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.

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.

Sometimes a good idea comes to you when you are not looking for it. Through an improbable combination of coincidence, naivete and lucky mistakes ...

Art is subject to arbitrary fashion.