Kary Mullis Quotes

"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."

"Religion is inwardly focused and driven only to sustain itself."

"Art is subject to arbitrary fashion."

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

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

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

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

"Science grows like a weed every year."

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

"Law shuttles between freeing us and enslaving us."

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

"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."

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

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

"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."

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

"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."

"I'm not driven by being understood."

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

"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."

"I'm not politically correct."

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

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

"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."

"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 like writing about biology, not doing it."

"I'm really optimistic in the mornings."

"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."

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

"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."