Not long ago it seemed the world was intent on remembering Kary Mullis more for his public antics than for his science.
Sure, his 1993 Nobel-winning discovery let scientists make unlimited copies of DNA samples, but that's not what put Mullis in the public eye.
Surfing and taking LSD did that. Slipping slides of naked women into his lecture, calling the empress of Japan "sweetie," cornering an Esquire reporter at his bedroom door and suggesting a more intimate way of getting to know him -- that's what took Mullis from the pages of Science to Elle.
He was not a bumbling, nutty professor, or a myopic, half-mad scientist talking in convoluted theorems. He was Hunter S. Thompson in a lab coat.
When asked about those days, you can almost hear him shrug over the phone from New York, the first stop of a 12-city book tour that brings him to Baltimore Friday. "Dancing in the Mind Field" (Pantheon Books, $24), a collection of essays written "to get people to start thinking," was released last month.
"There's the pre-Nancy Kary and the post-Nancy Kary," says Mullis, talking about the influence his fourth wife, Nancy Cosgrove, 50, has had on his life. Cosgrove, a former schoolteacher, brought him one of the great mysteries, he says: "true love."
The couple married last fall. "It calmed me down. It didn't make me more serious, because I was always serious," says Mullis, 53.
Love made him drink less. Love banished the pictures of old girlfriends from his refrigerator door. Love put abstract paintings, by his new wife and her sister, on the walls of his home in La Jolla, Calif. "My house is a lot more refined-looking," he says.
What of the old, gonzo Kary Mullis? Is he gone forever? Yes, and no. The antics are gone, but he still surfs the Pacific. He still takes hallucinogens.
"I wouldn't recommend them for everybody. But for me, it shows me something about myself that I didn't know, the experience of having my brain working in an altered way," he says. "The problem with the use of any drug is that people don't realize the dangers that are there."
A bit of a buzz
Once he nearly fried his brain. He synthesized a hallucinogen, took the concoction and crushed a friend's clarinet because he thought it was a snake. A day later, he woke up huddled under a desk. Three days passed before the drug's effects wore off.
"I had annihilated my personality," he writes of that experience. "I now knew what it felt like to be psychotic, to be meaningless. ... It sure as hell hadn't been fun being lost."
In conversation, Mullis exhibits an amazingly facile mind. He moves easily from discussing the history of science to the possibility that wearing a wet suit and sitting in a tub of cold water could be a great weight-loss program. After all, the body will burn fuel -- fat -- to stay warm.
He is still a contrarian, giving serious consideration to astrology, extraterrestrials, people traveling the astral plane. For Mullis, life is full of unanswered questions, and no question is off-limits. He no longer looks for answers in the lab. A trained biochemist, Mullis specialized in DNA research and molecular biology for 15 years before winning the Nobel Prize.
That part of life is behind him. These days he is more of a "writer as well as a scientist-philosopher type of guy," he says. "Dancing in the Mind Field" is his first book.
"Basically, what I think about is truth," says Mullis.
The current orthodoxy on global warming and the thinning ozone layer do not impress him. He doesn't believe humans have a great effect on such things. The accepted thesis that HIV causes AIDS has not been proved, he says. To Mullis' way of thinking, people should be as skeptical of scientific pronouncements as they are of political promises.
Scientists, beset by the need for grants and research funding, have their own agendas, he says. Every week a new disaster or cure seems to burst on the scene, and behind them are scientists hoping to make a living on the outcome, says Mullis. Scientists have built a separate world, complete with its own language. Gone are the days of shared scientific observation and demonstration at the Royal Society of London.
"You can't pick up a book on quantum electrodynamics and even think you understand the first page," says Mullis, who advocates making science more easily understood. "Sometimes it feels better to discuss your work in terms that almost nobody outside of your work circle can understand, because if you really try to explain it to them in the simplest terms, you might show them how simple it is."
Kary Banks Mullis was born in Lenoir, N.C., and grew up in Columbia, S.C. His mother, who stayed home to raise her family, said he had an "overactive mind." At age 6, he built a magnetic device to open a closet door. Later, he built rockets and used frogs as home-grown astronauts.
The discovery
He left the Carolinas for a bachelor of science in chemistry at Georgia Tech, then earned a doctorate in biochemistry from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1972. Eleven years later, while working for the Cetus Corp. in Emeryville, Calif., he invented the technique of polymerase chain reaction, PCR. It has been called one of the most important scientific advancements of this century.
"I'm in awe of the fact that I discovered it, and it has done so much for me," says Mullis. "If I hadn't figured it out, in a couple of years somebody would have. It was waiting for someone to turn over that rock."
Cetus gave him a $10,000 bonus for his discovery. Years later, the company sold the patent to Hoffmann-La Roche for $300 million. By then, Mullis had moved on. In 1986, he became director of molecular biology for Xytronyx Inc. of San Diego, and later became a consultant for several firms, including Eastman Kodak.
The world caught up to him in 1992, when he won the Japan Prize for the PCR discovery. He picked up $450,000 and joked with the empress. The next year he won the Nobel Prize in chemistry and received another $400,000. After getting the call from the Swedish Academy, he went surfing. In Stockholm, he quipped with the king and queen about possibly having his son marry their daughter.
He was a star, a surfing scientist, a geneticist talking about hallucinogens, sex, cosmology, you name it. He made "Nightline." O.J. Simpson's defense team retained him as a potential witness. He hit the lecture circuit. The Nobel changed his life.
"There is money involved, but what is more lasting is that once you have been given that accolade, no door in the world will fail to open for you at least once," he writes in his book. "It is a free pass for the rest of your life."
In a sense, Kary Mullis is free to let his mind roam. He wonders about the chance of an asteroid slamming into Earth. It happened before. It could happen again.
"When you think of it, out there in the asteroid belt there is an asteroid a half-a-mile wide that has our number on it," he says, musing over the phone. "It would be really interesting to know which one it was so we could blow it up, or drop it into the sun."
That sort of research requires money Mullis feels is being poorly spent on projects such as investigating the ozone layer. He talked his idea over with some people from NASA, making sure to mention that the project would give the military a job in this post-Cold War world. Nothing came of the discussion. Not to worry. He has other concerns.
More science
He pushes for full exploration of genetic engineering and the uses of DNA. Perhaps through chemical manipulation, potential birth defects could be identified in utero and prevented.
"Let's study the hell out of that science. Let's find out how to change things," he says. "If that leads to people trying to produce champion tennis players, that doesn't bother me a bit because I've seen children with muscular dystrophy. There should be no restrictions on it at all, you should let those scientists go."
These days Mullis' legacy is secure. He is busy cultivating a humble appreciation of the universe and "Old Blue and Green," as he calls our enduring planet. In his last chapter, he writes: "The appropriate demeanor for a human is to feel lucky that he is alive and to humble himself in the face of the immensity of things and have a beer. Relax. ... The sky is not falling."
Talking science
Nobel laureate Kary Mullis discusses his book, "Dancing in the Mind Field," at 7: 30 p.m. Friday at Bibelot, 1819 Reisterstown Road. Call: 410-653-6938.
Pub Date: 10/13/98