25 Facts About Kary Mullis

Kary Mullis's family had a background in farming in this rural area.

Kary Mullis grew up in Columbia, South Carolina, where he attended Dreher High School, graduating in the class of 1962.

Kary Mullis recalled his interest in chemistry beginning when he learned how to chemically synthesize and build solid fuel propulsion rockets as a high school student during the 1960s.

Kary Mullis earned a Bachelor of Science in chemistry from the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta in 1966, during which time he married his first wife, Richards Haley, and started a business.

Kary Mullis earned his PhD in 1973 in biochemistry at the University of California, Berkeley, in J B Neilands' laboratory, which focused on synthesis and structure of bacterial iron transporter molecules.

Kary Mullis acquired a reputation for erratic behavior at Cetus, once threatening to bring a gun to work; he engaged in "public lovers' quarrels" with his then-girlfriend and "nearly came to blows with another scientist" at a staff party, according to California Magazine.

Kary Mullis's behavior was so outrageous that the other scientists thought that the only reason I didn't fire him outright was that he was a friend of mine.

Thereafter, Kary Mullis worked intermittently as a consultant for multiple corporations and institutions on nucleic acid chemistry and as an expert witness specializing in DNA profiling.

In 1992, Kary Mullis founded a business to sell pieces of jewelry containing the amplified DNA of deceased famous people such as Elvis Presley and Marilyn Monroe.

Kary Mullis was a member of the USA Science and Engineering Festival's Advisory Board.

In 1983, Kary Mullis was working for Cetus Corporation as a chemist.

Kary Mullis recalled that, while driving in the vicinity of his country home in Mendocino County, he had the idea to use a pair of primers to bracket the desired DNA sequence and to copy it using DNA polymerase; a technique that would allow rapid amplification of a small stretch of DNA and become a standard procedure in molecular biology laboratories.

Saiki generated the needed data and Erlich authored the first paper to include utilization of the technique, while Kary Mullis was still working on the paper that would describe PCR itself.

Kary Mullis invented a UV-sensitive plastic that changes color in response to light.

Kary Mullis founded Altermune LLC in 2011 to pursue new ideas on the immune system.

Kary Mullis said he was inspired to fight this particular strep bacterium because it had killed his friend.

The method developed by Kary Mullis used repeated thermal cycling, which allowed the rapid and exponential amplification of large quantities of any desired DNA sequence from an extremely complex template.

The anthropologist Paul Rabinow wrote a book on the history of the PCR method in 1996, in which he discusses whether Kary Mullis "invented" PCR or merely came up with the concept of it.

Kary Mullis said science was being harmed by "the never-ending quest for more grants and staying with established dogmas", and that "science is being practiced by people who are dependent on being paid for what they are going to find out," not for what they actually produce.

Kary Mullis questioned the scientific validity of the link between HIV and AIDS, despite never having done any scientific research on either subject, leading some researchers to call him an AIDS denialist.

Kary Mullis wrote that he began to question the AIDS consensus while writing a NIH grant progress report and being unable to find a peer-reviewed reference that HIV was the cause of AIDS.

Kary Mullis published an alternative hypothesis for AIDS in 1994, claiming that AIDS is an arbitrary diagnosis used when HIV antibodies are found in a patient's blood.

Kary Mullis was often cited in the press as a supporter of molecular biologist and AIDS denialist Peter Duesberg.

Kary Mullis married four times and had three children by two of his wives.

Kary Mullis died on August 7,2019 at his home in Newport Beach, California, from complications of pneumonia.