Kary Mullis

“If reincarnation is a useful biological idea it is certain that somewhere in the universe it will happen.”

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

“I like writing about biology, not doing it.”

“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.”

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

“I'm really optimistic in the mornings.”

“I'm not politically correct.”

“PCR made it easier to see that certain people are infected with HIV.”

“Law shuttles between freeing us and enslaving us.”

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

“People realize this man knows what the hell's going on and nobody else does.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

“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 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.”

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

“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.”

“Until I was five, my immediate family lived near my grandfather's farm where my mother had grown up and, with the exception of a few modern conveniences, had not changed a lot over the years.”