Mad scientist
I hadn’t heard of Kary B. Mullis before, but when someone promises me a “hilarious Nobel prize acceptance lecture” from an “LSD-toting punk genius”, I follow the link.
That lecture is here, and it’s a bit different alright, though not so much for hilarity as for threading an autobiographical tale of broken marriages and lost love through the story of how he came up with the concept of polymerase chain reactions. Mullis remembers the date of breakthrough experiment because it was the birthday of his ex-wife Cynthia, which provokes the following reverie:
There is a general place in your brain, I think, reserved for “melancholy of relationships past.” It grows and prospers as life progresses, forcing you finally, against your grain, to listen to country music.
He closes his lecture remembering walking to his car having just celebreated the momentous breakthrough with his lab assistant Fred, past avocado trees ripening in Berkeley’s winter drizzle, and concludes thusly - “Neither Fred, empty Becks bottles, nor the sweet smell of the dawn of the age of PCR could replace Jenny. I was lonesome.”
Mullis’s unconventionality apparently also extends to denying both global warming and the role of HIV in causing AIDS, and to acting as a defence witness in OJ Simpson’s murder trial, which on this Wikipedia page leads to mention of “a refrigerator in his home covered in snapshots of all the women with whom he has had sexual relations, using his Nobel laureate status as an aphrodisiac”. Wow, who’d have thought a Nobel prize was such a sure-fire route to stud status?
