Ten Nobels for the future

Kary Banks Mullis was born on December 28, 1944, in Lenoir, North Carolina. The second son of Cecil Banks Mullis and Bernice Barker Fredericks, he moved with his parents and brothers to Columbia, South Carolina in 1949.

He graduated from Dreher High School in Columbia in 1962. Known for an irreverent sense of fun as well as a prodigious aptitude for science, he was student body vice-president during his senior year.

He received a B.S. degree in chemistry from the Georgia Institute of Technology in 1966. He went on to earn a Ph.D. degree in biochemistry from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1972 and lectured in biochemistry there until 1973. That year, Mullis became a postdoctoral fellow in pediatric cardiology at the University of Kansas Medical School, with emphasis in the areas of angiotensin and pulmonary vascular physiology. In 1977 he began two years of postdoctoral work in pharmaceutical chemistry at the University of California, San Francisco.

Kary Mullis joined the Cetus Corporation in Emeryville, California, as a DNA chemist in 1979. During his seven years there, he conducted research on oligonucleotide synthesis and invented the polymerase chain reaction (PCR), for which he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1993.

The PCR process, which he conceptualized in 1983, is hailed as one of the monumental scientific techniques of the twentieth century. A method of amplifying DNA, PCR multiplies a single, microscopic strand of the genetic material billions of times within hours. The process has multiple applications in medicine, genetics, biotechnology, and forensics. PCR, which was the theoretical basis for the novel and motion picture Jurassic Park because of its ability to extract DNA from fossils, is in reality the basis of a new scientific discipline, paleobiology.

In 1986, he was named director of molecular biology at Xytronyx, Inc. in San Diego, where his work was concentrated in DNA technology and photochemistry. In 1987 he began consulting on nucleic acid chemistry for more than a dozen corporations, including Angenics, Cytometrics, Eastman Kodak, Abbott Labs, Milligen/Biosearch, and Specialty Laboratories.

He is presently Vice President and Director of Molecular Biology at Burstein Technologies, Irvine, California.

Kary B. Mullis has authored several major patents, including the PCR technology and UV-sensitive plastic that changes color in response to light. He has been awarded many international prizes, including the Japan Prize in 1993, one of international science’s most prestigious awards.

His many publications include "The Cosmological Significance of Time Reversal" (Nature) , "The Unusual Origin of the Polymerase Chain Reaction" (Scientific American), "Primer-directed Enzymatic Amplification of DNA with a Thermostable DNA Polymerase" (Science), and "Specific Synthesis of DNA In Vitro via a Polymerase Catalyzed Chain Reaction" (Methods in Enzymology).

In his most recent book, Dancing Naked in the Mind Field (Pantheon Books/Random House 1998), "Mullis writes with passion and humour about a wide range of subjects: from the scientific method to parapsychology, from poisonous spiders to the HIV virus and AIDS, from global warming to astrology [...]", says the review of amazon.com. The book is dedicated to his wife, Nancy Cosgrove Mullis: "Jean-Paul Sartre somewhere observed that we each of us make our own hell out of the people around us. Had Jean-Paul known Nancy, he may have noted that at least one man, someday, might get very lucky, and make his own heaven out of one of the people around him [...]".

1998
Orthodoxy and Heresy
in Science

2000
Thought Repression from Galileo to Biotech