Quotes from Kary Mullis

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

Sometimes in the morning, when it's a good surf, I go out there, and I don't feel like it's a bad world.

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

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.

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

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.

Sometimes a good idea comes to you when you are not looking for it. Through an improbable combination of coincidence, naivete and lucky mistakes.

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'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.

I went to high school in Columbia. I met my first wife, Richards, whom I married while I was working on a B.S. in chemistry at Georgia Tech. She bore Louise, and I studied. I learned most of the useful technical things - math, physics, chemistry - that I now use during those four years.

Law shuttles between freeing us and enslaving us.

My grandfather milked several cows twice a day and supplied the neighbours with dairy products. He liked to go visiting around the county on Saturdays, and he also enjoyed the neighbours when they came by once a week with their empty milk jars. He walked them out to their cars and hung over the driver's side window until they drove off.

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.

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

My mother often mailed me articles from 'Reader's Digest' about advances in DNA chemistry. No matter how I tried to explain it to her, she never grasped the concept that I could have been writing those articles, that something I had invented made most of those DNA discoveries possible.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

Sometimes in the morning, when it's a good surf, I go out there, and I don't feel like it's a bad world.

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

Science consistently produces a new crop of miraculous truths and dazzling devices every year.