Quotes from Kary Mullis

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

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.

Art is subject to arbitrary fashion.

Religion is inwardly focused and driven only to sustain itself.

Science grows like a weed every year.

The biggest battle I fought with the danger officer was over the fact that I insisted on keeping my lunch and a case of Beck's beer in the same fridge in which I kept my radioactive isotopes.

Science, like nothing else among the institutions of mankind, grows like a weed every year. Art is subject to arbitrary fashion, religion is inwardly focused and driven only to sustain itself, law shuttles between freeing us and enslaving us.

It only needs to be convincing to the misinformed voter. Some of the big truths voters have accepted have little or no scientific basis. And these include the belief that AIDS is caused by human immunodeficiency virus, the belief that fossil fuel emissions are causing global warming, and the belief that the release of chlorofluorocarbons into the atmosphere has created a hole in the ozone layer. The illusions go even deeper into our everyday lives when they follow us to the grocery store.

I encountered a glowing green raccoon riding a neon orange motorcycle at my cabin in the woods of northern California around midnight one night in 1985. The raccoon proceeded to metamorphose into a singing dolphin at the stroke of midnight.

Any time a magnet wiggles, no matter how small it is, or how fast or slow it wiggles, it makes some kind of light. Most light is made by little magnets called molecules, and our eyes are tuned to a very narrow range of it.

wherever there is ignorance, you can always find arrogance.

present-day mental health practitioners have their heads firmly inserted in their asses and generally need more help than they provide.

You can't talk to a jury about the technical details of your specialty and make any sense. The jury won't know what you're talking about, and that is precisely why you were hired.

When the National Institutes of Health makes an announcement through one of its many spokespeople, who

When the National Institutes of Health makes an announcement through one of its many spokespeople, who checks out the credibility of that statement?

We have to make it on the basis of our own wit. We have to be aware—when someone comes on the seven o'clock news with word that the global temperature is going up or that the oceans are turning into cesspools or that half the matter is going backward—that the media are at the mercy of the scientists who have the ability to summon them and that the scientists who have such ability are not often minding the store. More likely they are minding their own livelihoods.

If there is something in my food that somebody says is a poison, I want to have the chemistry explained and decide for myself whether or not I want to eat it.

It is not allowable in science to make a statement of fact based solely on your own opinion.

I couldn't help but notice the amazing coincidence that the American patent on the production of freon, the principle chlorofluorocarbon used in refrigerators and air conditioners, expired at just about the same time freon was banned.

We accept the proclamations of scientists in their lab coats with the same faith once reserved for priests.

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. Welcome to Earth. It's a little confusing at first. That's why you have to come back over and over again before you learn to really enjoy yourself. The sky is not falling.

You can always back up and pick a new fork.

psychology is practiced by a bunch of well-paid incompetents.

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