Mullis has a place in Mendo; we have first dibs on the Nobel Prize...
Mullis begins with the event that changed his life, during a May 1983 nighttime drive through the mountains of Mendocino County in a silver Honda. Applying his knowledge of computer programming, Mullis mentally conjured up a technique of finding a specific sequence on DNA and replicating the hell out of it. ''Natural DNA is a tractless coil,'' he says, ''like an unwound and tangled audiotape on the floor of the car in the dark.'' The polymerase chain reaction makes sense of that tape. Now ''you could have all the DNA you wanted,'' he writes. And it's ''easy.'' P.C.R. finds and multiplies tiny fragments of DNA. After 30 doublings, for instance, you have a billion times as much as you started with.
Mullis explains: ''It was a chemical procedure that would make the structures of the molecules of our genes as easy to see as billboards in the desert and as easy to manipulate as Tinkertoys. . . . It would find infectious diseases by detecting the genes of pathogens that were difficult or impossible to culture. . . . The field of molecular paleobiology would blossom because of P.C.R. Its practitioners would inquire into the specifics of evolution from the DNA in ancient specimens. . . . And when DNA was finally found on other planets, it would be P.C.R. that would tell us whether we had been there before.''
Mullis submitted his paper to the two most prestigious science journals in the world, Science and Nature. Both rejected it. He had some consolation. On Oct. 13, 1993, a phone call from Stockholm offered him the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. ''I'll take it!'' he said, displaying the decisiveness that has marked his career. He then called his mother to tell her she could stop sending him articles from Reader's Digest about advances in DNA chemistry.
biology-online.org
In Mullis's 1998 essay collection, Dancing Naked in the Mind Field, he relates a number of experiences that some consider strange, and which critics point out to question his scientific judgment. He also details his use of LSD. Perhaps the strangest episode Mullis relates, he says, happened while at his cabin in the remote northern California wilds; John Edward Mack noted that episode has many hallmarks of the abduction phenomenon. Late one evening while walking to the latrine, Mullis saw a "glowing raccoon" which spoke to him, saying "Good evening, doctor." The next thing he remembered, several hours had seemingly passed without his recall: it was dawn, and he was strolling on a path near the cabin. His clothing was dry and clean, unlike what he'd expected from wandering the forest in the dark of night for several hours.
Mullis later wrote, "I wouldn't try to publish a scientific paper about these things, because I can't do any experiments. I can't make glowing raccoons appear. I can't buy them from a scientific supply house to study. I can't cause myself to be lost again for several hours. But I don't deny what happened. It's what science calls anecdotal, because it only happened in a way that you can't reproduce. But it happened."[7]
en.wikipedia.org
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(I'm pissed; I left Berkely in '66; he could have turned me on 6 years earlier)
Dancing Naked in the Mind Field
Mullis, Kary. (1998).
New York:Pantheon.
Note: The author was awarded a Nobel Prize for inventing the polymerase chain reaction (PCR).
Excerpt(s): At Georgia Tech, I had a wife and a little girl. I had short hair and I studied all the time. My senior year I made perfect grades. I studied physics and math and chemistry to the point where I would never have to study them again. And all I knew about drugs was what I read in magazines like Time and Life. I learned that marijuana was a dangerous addictive drug and that I should stay away from it. On the other hand, I learned that LSD was a miracle that just might enable scientists to understand the workings of the brain, could be the cure for alcoholism, and, just incidentally, might prevent World War III. Psychiatrists were prescribing it for their patients. In 1966 LSD had not yet been made illegal. Respected, well known people were admitting that they had experimented with LSD. The Luce family, the publishers of Time and Life, were so intrigued by the scientific potential of LSD that they funded the research of Harvard professor Timothy Leary.
A person who loved playing with chemicals as much as I did just couldn't help but be intrigued by LSD. The concept that there existed chemicals with the ability to transform the mind, to open up new windows of perception, fascinated me. I considered myself to be a serious scientist. At the time it was still all very scholarly and still legal. There was no tawdry aura over it. People weren't blaming their kids' problems on it yet. Hippies had just started to differentiate themselves from beatniks and the difference seemed to be fewer years and more hair on the hippies. And they stayed in college.
In 1966 I wanted to try LSD. My wife, Richards, helped me pack up the Impala, we put our daughter Louise in the back seat, and we drove to Berkeley for graduate school. ...
Brad had experimented with psychedelic drugs and agreed to guide me through my first trip. He suggested that before I took LSD, I should smoke some marijuana because it might give me some idea of how my consciousness would be changed. Marijuana scared me, I told him. Everything I'd read about it said that it was a bad drug, an addictive drug - one toke and you're a slave for life.
He persuaded me to smoke a "joint" as he called it. Within moments my fear disappeared. I was laughing. Brad and I talked about wise things for hours. ...
During dinner, Brad gave me what was called a double-domed 1000 microgram Owsley. He had bought it for five dollars. It was soon to become illegal. I didn't finish dinner. I started laughing. I got up from the table and realized, on the way to the couch, that everything I knew was based on a false premise. I fell down through the couch into another world.
Brad put Mysterious Mountain by Hovhaness on the stereo and kept playing it over and over. It was the perfect background for my journey. I watched somebody else's beliefs become irrelevant. Who was that Kary Mullis character? That Georgia Tech boy. I wasn't afraid. I wasn't anything. I noticed that time did not extend smoothly - that it was punctuated by moments - and I fell down into a crack between two moments and was gone.
My body lay on the couch for almost four hours. I felt like I was everywhere. I was thrilled. I'd been trapped in my own experiences - now I was free. The world was filled with incredibly tiny spaces where no one could find me or care what I was doing. I was alone. My mind could see itself.
Brad had given me 1000 micrograms because he wanted me to have a thorough experience. I think he said "blow your ass away." With 100 micrograms you feel a little weird, you might hallucinate, and you can go dancing, but you know you're on acid. You're aware that you're having a trip and the things that you see are hallucinations. You know that you should not respond to them. When you take 1000 micrograms of LSD, you don't know you've taken anything. It just feels like that's the way it is. You might suddenly find yourself sitting on a building in Egypt three thousand years ago, watching boats on the Nile. ...
About five o'clock in the morning I began to come back to earth. The most amazing aspect of the entire experience was that I landed back in the middle of my normal life. It was so sweet to hear the birds, to see the sun come up, to watch my little girl wake up and start playing. I appreciated my life in a way I never had before.
On the following Monday I went to school. I remember sitting on a bench, waiting for a class to begin, thinking, "That was the most incredible thing I've ever done." ...
I wanted to understand what had happened. How could 1000 micrograms - one thousandth of a gram - of some chemical cause my entire fucking sensorium to undergo such incredible changes? What mechanisms inside my brain were being so drastically affected? What did these chemicals do to my visuals? I wanted to know how it worked. I wanted to know more about neurochemistry. (pages 162-167)
csp.org |
