Remembering Kary Mullis

Outspoken. Against dogma. Nobel Laureate inventor of PCR.

Tomorrow marks the three year anniversary of the death of Kary Mullis, an American biochemist who won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1993 for inventing polymerase chain reaction (PCR).

Mullis was outspoken and often went against scientific dogmas. He mulled (pun intended) on the state of science, corruption, the medical system, and “staying in your lane.” No question was off-limits, whether it was about HIV/AIDS, climate change, psychedelics, astrology, or aliens. He didn’t care if he sounded “out there.” This led to much of the media calling him a kook.

In my opinion, he was often misrepresented. In honor of his life and achievements, this article will bring together excerpts from interviews he’s given, and his autobiography, Dancing Naked in the Mind Field.

A word of caution: some of the quotes of Mullis were from over a decade ago. It’s possible he changed some of his opinions since then.

The significance of PCR

PCR is a technique for quickly making many copies of a specific segment of DNA.

It revolutionized biology. It became invaluable for genetic sequencing, diagnosing genetic diseases, and detecting the presence of viruses or microbes. It allowed us to regularly analyze DNA evidence from crime scenes. It transformed how we analyzed fossil DNA, which would help elucidate the evolution of organisms.

How thinking about computer programs helped Mullis come up with PCR

Mullis came up with PCR because he was trying to solve a problem.

According to his autobiography, Dancing Naked in the Mind Field, he conceptualized the problem as a computer “FIND” function:

What kind of chemical program would be required to “FIND” a specific sequence on DNA with 3 billion nucleotides and then display that sequence to a human who was trillions of times larger than the DNA?

For example, you might have a tissue sample from a person and want to quickly know whether a certain virus was present. One way to do that would be to look for a specific segment of DNA that is unique to that virus.

PCR allows us to do that. The image above depicts the initial steps of PCR.

In the first step, DNA from our sample gets heated to 94°C. This causes the two strands of DNA to separate; aka it “denatures.”

Then the DNA is cooled to 50-56°C. This allows for “primers” to attach to the separated DNA strands.

The primers are sequences that provide a starting point for DNA synthesis. They define the region that will be amplified. In the case of using PCR to determine whether a sample contains a certain virus, they should be specific to that virus.

In the extending stage, a DNA polymerase enzyme “reads” the existing DNA strands to create two new strands that match the existing ones. Now we have two pieces of the original double-stranded DNA instead of one.

If we repeat the denaturing, annealing, and extending stages over and over again, 2 becomes 4 becomes 8 becomes 16 and so on. By the end, we will have amplified the original DNA segment many times over and have enough of it to do analyses with.

Mullis describes how computer programming influenced his thinking:

I knew computer programming, and from that I understood the power of a reiterative mathematical procedure. That’s where you apply some process to a starting number to obtain a new number, and then you apply the same process to a new number, and so on. If the process is multiplication by two, then the result of many cycles is an exponential increase in the value of the original number: 2 becomes 4 becomes 8 becomes 16 becomes 32 and so on.

A funny coincidence from the Nobel Prize award ceremony

In Dancing Naked in the Mind Field, he talks about going to the award ceremony to accept his Nobel Prize:

I invited my mother, my two sons, and a nice woman named Einhoff, whom I’d been dating for only a few weeks, to accompany me to Stockholm for the ceremony. I also took Cynthia, the mother of my two boys.

That year two Nobel Prizes in chemistry were awarded. Michael Smith… was also honored with a Nobel Prize. He too invited his former wife, their children, and his girl friend to the ceremony.

This kind of coincidence cannot be assigned a statistical probability because it happens only once.

Mullis receiving the Nobel Prize

On noticing that something was amiss in science

In Dancing Naked in the Mind Field, Mullis describes how when he was younger he naively thought that there were people “minding the store.” He assumed there was an “elite group of people with great wisdom who had proven themselves” who “watched over” us.

During his second year as a graduate student of biochemistry, something happened that would seriously call that into question.

He submitted an article about cosmology called, “The Cosmological Significance of Time Reversal” to one of the top science journals, Nature:

I had read a lot about astrophysics and had taken some psychoactive drugs, which enhanced my perceived understanding of the cosmos. Not very good reasons to think that an international journal of science would want to publish my views…

To his surprise, it was accepted.

His reaction:

At first I was elated by the response. Nature Times News Service circulated an article beginning, “It sounds like the wildest science fiction, But an American scientist seriously suggests that half the matter in the universe is going backwards in time.” Later in the article they referred to me as “Dr. Kary Mullis of California University.”

I began to be a little concerned. Something was definitely amiss in the world of science.

I was not a doctor. I was still a student only hoping to become a doctor. Who had promoted me to doctor? Why would the news services pick up the story and print it all over the world in the papers?

This was one of the moments that helped him realize that there was no one “minding the store”:

I grew up. I lost that long-abiding feeling that there were older, wiser people minding the store.

If there had been, they would not have allowed my first sophomoric paper on the structure of the universe to be published in the foremost scientific journal in the world.

It gets better.

After Mullis came up with PCR, by then he knew what he had discovered. He knew the impact it would have, and that it would spread across the world like wildfire.

This time there was no doubt in my mind: Nature would publish it.

They rejected it. So did Science, the second most prestigious journal in the world.

He eventually published the results in Methods in Enzymology.

This experience taught me a thing or two, and I grew up some more.

No wise men sit up there, watching the world from the vantage point of their last twenty years of life, making sure the wisdom they have accumulated is being used.

We have to make it on the basis of our own wit.

On not keeping his head down in science

From this interview Mullis gave in 2010, he describes how scientists often “keep their head down” (42:00):

It’s in our genes in a sense to keep our head down… You can imagine a row of guys two million years ago walking across the savannas of Africa… and you didn’t want to stick your head up too high… Because you might get killed or eaten or whatever if you make a noise or a spectacle of yourself. So we have this strong… need to follow… It’s not terribly conscious.

But keeping your head down below the line of fire… It works its way up into: what will you do as a professional scientist in terms of what are you going to work on this month?

There’s a real conservative sort of a “no we can’t do something that would be totally ridiculous… that other people haven’t done.” It’s sort of like you want to do something that people haven’t done, but it’s gotta be sort of in line with things that they have done.

You can’t go against the general concepts that are floating around in a field.

I’m sort of a contrarian kind of person I guess… I think it helps to have a few people like me around that just say, “I don’t like any of this.”

Controversy over HIV and AIDS

You’ll often come across media articles saying that Mullis was an “HIV/AIDS denialist.” This can encompass a diverse range of views, from thinking that HIV doesn’t exist, to thinking that HIV is only one factor that leads to AIDS.

I’m no expert on this topic and admit that I haven’t looked that deeply into it. But my guess is that most of the media railing against “AIDS denialism” haven’t either.

What did Mullis say about HIV/AIDS? For one thing, his views on it shifted somewhat over time.

If you listen to this 1996 interview, or this interview, you’ll learn that Mullis thought that HIV existed, but that no one had conclusively shown that it caused AIDS.

He first began questioning things when he was writing a grant proposal for a project. At the time he was a consultant at a lab that measured HIV in people’s blood. The proposal started off with a statement: “HIV is the probable cause of AIDS.” He searched for a reference for that statement, and couldn’t find any.

And it turned out that nobody knew it. There wasn’t a scientific reference, like a paper that somebody had submitted with like experimental data in it and logical discussion and said “Here’s how come we know that HIV is the probable cause of AIDS.” There was nothing like that out there. Nothing.

Now let’s step forward into the future for a bit, to a 2010 interview the Mullis gave where it seems his views on it had shifted somewhat:

The thing that causes AIDS is not a species of the Retroviridae, it’s the whole genus… And there’s some members of the genus that are much more effective at doing it, than others, but it isn’t caused by one, like HIV-1 that was… somebody sequenced that and they found, hey every time we find this… every other patient it’s a slightly different sequence… We’re not dealing with a species here…

And:

It’s not just HIV as originally defined by Bob Gallo and Luc Montagnier. It’s a whole bunch of things; they’re retroviral, but they don’t all have the same sequence.

A few things:

(1) Based on this, it’s a bit misleading to say that Mullis thought that HIV did not cause AIDS, or that he was an “HIV/AIDS denialist.” What he said was that the entire genus that HIV was a part of, caused AIDS. I don’t know if his views shifted even more since then- after all, that interview was from 2010- but these were the latest statements on HIV/AIDS I could find from him.

I also don’t know whether what he said in 2010 would still be controversial today, but I do know that we now regularly talk about at least two strains of HIV (HIV-1 and HIV-2) as playing a role in AIDS.

(2) Just because his views shifted somewhat doesn’t mean that his original skepticism from the 1990s wasn’t justified.

What he said back then was that there was no reference that showed that HIV caused AIDS, or even that HIV was the probable cause of AIDS. And by “reference,” he meant a study, not just some document that the NIH or CDC produced.

This seems like an easily falsifiable statement. At the time that Mullis said this, did such a study exist or not?

No media article making fun of Mullis as an “AIDS denialist” has attempted to fact-check this simple statement, as far as I can tell.

(3) Even if Mullis had thought that HIV did not cause AIDS and had believed this till the day he died, would that have been a good reason for the media to write him off as a kook?

Scientists disagree on things all the time. On many of these issues the media doesn’t take a stance. But on this particular issue, so many people have such strong opinions to the point where it’s a barometer for judging who’s a kook, despite the fact that they haven’t looked into it themselves. Why?

I think it has something to do with powerful propaganda campaigns. They usually contain phrases like “overwhelming consensus” and “conspiracy theories.” Only certain issues are discussed this way. It should make us all the more curious.

On science and belief

That brings us to what Mullis said in his autobiography:

Science as it is practiced today in the world is largely not science at all. What people call science is probably very similar to what was called science in 1634. Galileo was told to recant his beliefs or be excommunicated. People who refuse to accept the commandments of the AIDS establishment are basically told the same thing. “If you don’t accept what we say, you’re out.”

From the 1996 interview (1:17:45):

Science isn’t a set of beliefs… Scientists are not supposed to believe anything. Scientists are supposed to have some evidence that leads them tentatively to some conclusion or to some action…

And:

Almost every single thing that is considered a fact in the twentieth century in another 200,000 years will look very silly.

On Fauci and recognizing who the “good” scientists are

From the 1996 interview :

This is a series of quotes clipped together from the 1996 interview with Gary Null

Guys like Fauci get up there and start talking… He doesn’t know anything, really about anything, and I’d say that to his face…

He should not be in the position that he’s in. Most of those guys at the top are total administrative people and they don’t know anything about what’s going on with the body…

Those guys have got an agenda, which is not what we would like them to have… They’ve got a personal agenda, they make up their own rules as they go… and they smugly- like, Tony Fauci does not mind going on television in front of the people who pay his salary and lie directly into the camera.

On how people don’t know how to judge who the best scientists are:

You can’t expect the sheep to really respect the best and brightest. They don’t know the difference really. I mean I like humans, don’t get me wrong. But basically, the vast majority of them do not possess the ability to judge who is and who isn’t a good scientist.

That’s the main problem with science in this century because scientists being judged by people; funding is being done by people who don’t understand it.

On doctors, and the medical system

Here (48:50) in response to his interviewer talking about the “gold standard” test for HIV at the time, he said:

The general public doesn’t understand the idea of a gold standard here. Neither do doctors. Physicians.

Just pull the average physician away from his convention someplace. And sit down and have dinner with him and talk to him about this kind of a situation and see how much he really knows.

Does he know what a Western does? Does he know what a Western blot actually does? How’s it different from this ELISA test? Does he understand how an ELISA test is operated? No, he doesn’t…

Elsewhere, he has said of the medical system (5:24):

I being a part of it, don’t ever go to it.

I don’t care whether I have medical insurance or not cause I don’t ever partake. I like drugs. But I don’t like doctors. I don’t like the whole system.

In here (around 8:29), he describes how his mother wouldn’t listen to him over her doctors:

Her doctors are never questioned at all, even though her son is sort of a medical person himself and sometimes disagrees with them. Because I’m her son, of course I don’t have any brains.

On regulatory agencies and “surrogate goals”

In Dancing Naked in the Mind Field, Mullis talked about the drug AZT:

The FDA didn’t require them to show that it would cure AIDS and not kill the patient any more than they required them to show that about AZT. They only required that a surrogate goal be met. A surrogate goal means that something that we think may be related to the disease in question may be improved by the drug, like the level of CD-4 cells, whatever the fuck they are. It’s a way to get around the notion that a drug ought to be effective in curing the disease that it is sold for before it can be sold. The surrogate goal bullshit is an indication that our FDA no longer serves our needs. Or at least it does serve our needs unless we own stock in the pharmaceutical industry and don’t give a shit about health care.

On how science should be funded

From the 1996 interview (9:07):

If you’re going to fund a scientist for something and he says “Here’s what I’ll do and you give me $200k and I’ll do this…” Well ok, why don’t you just give him the $200k and let him do what he wants with it. Don’t make him tell you what he’s doing, don’t make him convince his colleagues what he’s gonna work on.

If he’s good enough to give it to him for one thing, just give it to him and let him decide. Because you’ll get a lot better science that way…

And at around 10:50:

To have a central authority like the NIH making all the medical decisions is kind of ridiculous.

On misusing PCR

In this interview from 1993, someone asked Mullis about how PCR tests could be misused. His response:

I think “misuse PCR” is not quite… I don’t think you can misuse PCR. 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…

If you can amplify one single molecule up to something that you can really measure, which PCR can do, then there’s just very few molecules that you don’t have at least one single one of in your body. So that can be thought of as a misuse; just to claim that it’s meaningful.

And:

It’s just a process that’s used to make a whole lot of something out of something... It doesn’t tell you that you’re sick and it doesn’t tell you that the thing you ended up with really was gonna hurt you or anything like that.

More on this later.

On astrology

WaPo has said that Mullis “defends astrology,” the LA Times said that he was “astrology-believing,” National Geographic said that he “extols the virtues of astrology.,” and Wikipedia said that his autobiography “asserted his belief in astrology.”

The writer Scott Alexander said, “He is a global warming denialist, HIV/AIDS denialist, and ozone hole denialist; on the other hand, he does believe in the efficacy of astrology.”

Mullis’s autobiography does indeed have a chapter about astrology. But what does it contain?

Here are some excerpts:

We consider ourselves to be sophisticated, intelligent, modern people. Our psychologists and sociologists consider astrology to be nonsense. Academic departments concerned with human behavior consider astrology to be a confusing distraction, with no serious value to their pursuits. And it’s not that they’ve never heard of it…

The reason they don’t pay attention to it is that it would embarrass them in front of their colleagues. There’s no proven body of facts in the social sciences that says human behavior does not contain elements that are related to planetary positions at the time of birth. Instead, there’s a broad and arrogant understanding among social science professionals that folklore, like astrology, is for simpletons. Without doing any simple experiments to test some of the tenets of astrology, it has been completely ignored by psychologists in the last two centuries.

Most of them are under the false impression that it is not-scientific and not a fit subject for their serious study. They are dead wrong. Whether or not the present-day practitioners of astrology are using scientific methods has no direct bearing on whether the body of knowledge they employ is true and valid. To have dismissed it without any experimental evaluation as insubstantial drivel from the masses says a lot about the fact that the present-day mental health practitioners have their heads firmly inserted in their asses and generally need more help than they provide.

He adds that “folklore is a rich source of new information,” and that we “ought to be looking around for some new theories,” and that astrology “could be a valuable tool for understanding human beings if serious students of behavior would lower themselves to examine it.”

Astrology by itself is not the answer to all our problems any more than herbs from the Amazon witch doctor, but it’s a shame to waste such a vast and ancient resource because of the simple fact that our modern witch doctors are too frozen in their attitudes to take a look around.

In that chapter, Mullis also mentions a study of the distribution of medical students in birth months that discovered that a lot of medical students were born in late June.

And hey, it might turn out that birth month affects disease risk. Oh and there’s an active debate about whether cycles of the Moon affect menstruation in women.

That’s not to say that these effects were due to the influence of the moon or planets. But they’re surprising. What’s going on?

More to the point: when the media calls Mullis “astrology-believing,” or whatever, they’re trying to depict him as some kind of a superstitious kook. But if they had bothered to read what he wrote about astrology, they might discover that the point he was making wasn’t that astrology was right, or that he “believed” in it.

Instead, he seemed to be making a subtler point; that “folklore,” including astrology, was a rich source of information, and our current day researchers dismiss it, not because they’ve studied it, but because they’re easily embarrassed elitists.

On not staying in your lane

From his website:

One of the nicest things about winning the Nobel Prize is that you can divert your interests in any direction that you are serious about, even if it is not the same thing that you have been successful with in the past. But you don't have to win a Nobel in order to change your field. It just makes it easier. Deep ruts in the road are a problem in science. It can be very competitive and scientists are sticking their neck out when they go into a new field, where they may not even know the basics.

I do not suggest that everyone become interdisciplinary - we do need superspecialists, but I am suggesting that once you are an expert at one thing, don't feel that is the only thing you are ever going to be an expert in.

Controversy over his death

Mullis died on Aug. 7, 2019. According to media accounts, the cause of death was complications from pneumonia.

Because he died shortly before the COVID-19 pandemic, some people have speculated that he was killed. After all, it’s not a giant stretch of the imagination to think that he probably would have been a colossal pain in the ass for the pandemic establishment narrative.

Here’s what I could find on this: Widow of scientist who invented PCR test hits out at Covid denier conspiracists who claim he was murdered by Fauci

According to that article, his widow thought that the idea that he was killed was nonsense.

That may very well be true, but the article contains some red flags.

For one, it of course said that he “believed in astrology.” Hmm.

It also contains a quote from his widow that attempts to “rebut” criticisms that some people have had about how PCR was used for COVID. According to the article, she said:

The other salient point is that PCR has advanced since it was first invented. Just like cars or airplanes advanced, PCR did too. To say that it shouldn’t be used for Covid is harkening back to what Kary said about AIDS in the 1990s but PCR has advanced since then.

I’m not saying that she didn’t say this, but something about it is strange. For one thing, it straw mans the criticisms about how the PCR tests were used.

The more legitimate criticisms had to do with how they were used to determine “positive cases,” especially in instances where PCR was run with too many cycles (the number of heating/cooling steps), which would lead to false positives.

We were also told that people could have “asymptomatic covid cases.” Those would be people who tested positive but didn’t exhibit any symptoms. What would Mullis have thought of that?

I can’t speak for him. But what I can say is that yes, PCR has advanced a lot over the years, but what he said back then, that “it’s just a process that’s used to make a whole lot of something out of something” and that it “doesn’t tell you that you’re sick,” has remained the same.

So I don’t know whether that article was quoting his widow accurately, but it sure reeks to me.

That doesn’t mean that I think Mullis was killed either. I have no idea. How could anyone?

What I can say, is that if I could have chosen one person to bring back from the dead to watch them respond to all the COVID-19 shenanigans, it would have been Kary Mullis.

I’m pretty sure he would have raised some hell.