Kary Mullis

I'm not politically correct.

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.

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.

Law shuttles between freeing us and enslaving us.

Science grows like a weed every year.

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.

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

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.

It's not blaming the victim. It's not anybody's fault. They just did something that didn't work, that's all.

Religion is inwardly focused and driven only to sustain itself.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

The horror of it is, every goddamn thing you look at seems pretty scary to me.

Art is subject to arbitrary fashion.

They can't pooh-pooh me now, because of who I am.

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

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

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.

I like writing about biology, not doing it.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

You can't ask your pharmacist to stock larger quantities of potassium nitrate because you want to make a bigger rocket.

I'm really optimistic in the mornings.