Kary Mullis quotes

Kary Mullis was an American biochemist best known for inventing the polymerase chain reaction (PCR) technique. This groundbreaking method transformed molecular biology and medical diagnostics. He received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his innovative work. Here are 37 of his quotes:

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

Kary Mullis

Science grows like a weed every year.

Kary Mullis

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

Kary Mullis

It's not even probable, let alone scientifically proven, that HIV causes AIDS. If there is evidence that HIV causes AIDS, there should be scientific documents which either singly or collectively demonstrate that fact, at least with a high probability. There are no such documents. Spin Magazine, Vol. 10 No.4, 1994.

Kary Mullis

Art is subject to arbitrary fashion.

Kary Mullis

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

Kary Mullis

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

Kary Mullis

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.

Kary Mullis

I'm not politically correct.

Kary Mullis

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.

Kary Mullis

Law shuttles between freeing us and enslaving us.

Kary Mullis

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.

Kary Mullis

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.

Kary Mullis

Years from now, people will find our acceptance of the HIV theory of AIDS as silly as we find those who excommunicated Galileo.

Kary Mullis

Where is the research that says HIV is the cause of AIDS? There are 10,000 people in the world now who specialize in HIV. None has any interest in the possibility HIV doesn't cause AIDS because if it doesn't, their expertise is useless.

Kary Mullis

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.

Kary Mullis

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

Kary Mullis

I'm really optimistic in the mornings.

Kary Mullis

The global warmers ... predict that global warming is coming, and our emissions are to blame. They do that to keep us worried about our role in the whole thing. If we aren't worried and guilty, we might not pay their salaries. It's that simple.

Kary Mullis

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

Kary Mullis

People keep asking me, "You mean you don't believe that HIV causes AIDS?" And I say, "Whether I believe it or not is irrelevant! I have no scientific evidence for it." I might believe in God, and He could have told me in a dream that HIV causes AIDS. But I wouldn't stand up in front of scientists and say, "I believe HIV causes AIDS because God told me." I'd say, "I have papers here in hand and experiments that have been done that can be demonstrated to others."

Kary Mullis

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.

Kary Mullis