Years ago, I dated someone who had his share of ridiculous ideas, as do we all. He was sweet and we stayed friends after we split up. A few months later, he took an IQ test and it told him that he was a super genius. Unfortunately, he took this as a sign that some of his wilder ideas percolating on the back burner were correct and everyone else was just too dumb to understand him.
Unburdened by us peons, he gorged on his own genius. He eventually found out the painful way that no, he had not taught himself martial arts by reading books.
Today’s Moment of Science… Kary Mullis and Nobel Disease.
The temptation is strong to grant neo-deity status upon people who’ve broken through the most daunting of intellectual barriers. Redefine our understanding of the atom? Congratulations, there are people who will believe you can redefine our understanding of goddamn everything else.
It’s why we have a phenomenon sometimes described as Nobel Disease. After they’ve collected Alfred Nobel’s blood money and gone home to bask in the glow of their perceived genius, a handful of the laureates have decided truth is theirs to bend. Once in a while, they go from diligent researchers to spouting off about some utterly daffy shit.
Inevitably when this happens, they trade in on their reputation as Nobel prize winners for credibility. And it works.
Linus Pauling won a couple of Nobels and then convinced people to consume absurd amounts of vitamin C to ward off disease (which it does not). Francis Crick- co-stealer of the double-helix discovery- got way into the idea that aliens banged life onto this planet. Luc Montagnier won the Nobel for isolating the HIV virus and went on to brew an entire cauldron of batshit, promoting homeopathy, anti-vaccine rhetoric, and the idea that a healthy diet could treat HIV. So.
Speaking of HIV.
Kary Mullis contributed something absofuckinglutely incredible to science: the polymerase chain reaction, aka the PCR. It is impossible to overstate the importance of the PCR to modern science. TL;DR, heat is used to denature DNA into two single strands, then an enzyme called Taq polymerase builds up copies of those original strands. These precise cycles of temperature adjustments while enzymes and proteins silently cleave and build enables all DNA analysis today.
Then there’s this asshole.
At first, Mullis just sounds colorful. While at Berkeley, he developed a reputation as a synthetic chemist. Specifically, a chemist who synthesized drugs. He sent an explanation for the universe that he’d written while on some mind altering substance to the prestigious publication Nature. They published it. As a grad student, his thesis was almost not accepted until his friends convinced him to cut out the “whacko stuff.” He eventually landed his job at Cetus, a biotech firm, based on the recommendation of a colleague who knew he’d made quality hallucinogens in college.
He fought with other scientists, sometimes physically. He dated co-workers which, in and of itself, was not a problem. But it got a bit sticky when they had loud arguments in which he threatened to bring a gun to work.
When he first came up with the idea for the PCR, a lot of people at the company rolled their eyes. He wasn’t great at running experiments, this wasn’t his area of expertise, and he’d had other “revolutionary” breakthroughs that went nowhere. But for this one, the lab provided skilled researchers to pull it off. Though there’s debate over who really breathed life into his idea for the PCR, the spark of an idea belonged to Kary Mullis alone.
However, he didn’t own the intellectual property or get a piece of the $300 million that the company got for the rights to the technology. He was- technical term- a cranky bitch about that.
But he did win the motherfucking Nobel Prize in chemistry in 1993, which isn’t nothing. And he knew it.
After that though? Well.
Mullis started rejecting well established scientific phenomena without reason. CFCs ripping apart the ozone? He wasn’t buying it. Global warming? Nah. He claimed to have seen a fluorescent talking raccoon right before he believed he’d been abducted by aliens. He got super fucking into astrology. He became a vocal AIDS denier, claiming the disease was caused by poverty, not a virus. Which was quite an idea for the guy who made the very technology that allows us to analyze the genetics of the goddamn virus.
In his biography, he wrote that “being a Nobel laureate is a license to be an expert in lots of things as long as you do your homework.” If only he had ever done his homework.
Kary Mullis died in August, 2019 of pneumonia. He was 74.
This has been your Moment of Science, reminding you that on the internet, nobody knows you’re not a Nobel laureate.
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Actually, Kjell Kleppe and his research team contributed tons to Kary Mullis’ work. Mullis went to visit Kleppe’s lab, learning the PCR technique which they did at Kleppe’s lab from the 60’s. What Mullis did, was successfully isolating a thermophile polymerase that could withstand the denaturation step in the PCR method (making it an easier and quicker method).
So, it is directly wrong to say he got the idea, because actually Kleppe and his team was the ones that started the pioneering work.
Sadly, Kleppe passed away before Mullis received the Nobel prize, and that may be the reason why Mullis got it alone.