Kary Mullis

If the Nobel disease had a poster boy.

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“”Once he turned on the lights and left sacks of groceries on the floor, he lighted his path to the outhouse with a flashlight. On the way, he saw something glowing under a fir tree. Shining the flashlight on this glow, it seemed to be a raccoon with little black eyes. The raccoon spoke, saying, ‘Good evening, doctor,’ and he replied with a hello.

—You read that correctly. We are not kidding.

Kary Banks Mullis (1944–2019) was a Nobel Prize-winning biochemist, best known for developing the polymerase chain reaction (PCR), unquestionably one of the most important tools in molecular biology.

Unfortunately, he had a number of less-founded views that he publicly expounded upon.

Where's the beef?

Given that he claimed that his LSD use had a major role in his work on PCR (James Watson, one of the discoverers of DNA, made similar claims with respect to his development of DNA as a concept prior to empirically confirming it), it is perhaps unsurprising that he held a number of bizarre views on subjects outside his specialty, and endorsed various and sundry conspiracy theories and pseudosciences.

Crank views

See the main article on this topic: Nobel disease

“”Being a Nobel laureate is a license to be an expert in lots of things as long as you do your homework.

—Mullis

To name a few:

• AIDS Denialism: Mullis hung around with noted AIDS denialist Peter Duesberg and believed AIDS is a conspiracy involving the government and scientists.

“”We have not been able to discover any good reasons why most of the people on earth believe that AIDS is a disease caused by a virus called HIV. There is simply no scientific evidence demonstrating that this is true."

—Mullis, in a foreward to Duesberg's book

• Alien abduction: Mullis claimed he had had an encounter with an extraterrestrial being, in which he denied the involvement of LSD. More specifically — he reported having close contact with a glowing green raccoon at his cabin in the woods of northern California around midnight one night in 1985. No, really.
• Aliensdidit: Mullis saw evidence of Urantia Book scientific foreknowledge, writing "Several scientific developments, unexpected in 1955, reported in 2005 in Science and Nature […] were somehow described rather precisely already in the Urantia Book."
• Astrology
• Climate change denialism

See also

• Nobel disease