Kary B. Mullis life and biography

Kary B. Mullis is a Nobel Prize winning American biochemist, author, and lecturer. In recognition of his improvement of the polymerase chain reaction (PCR) technique, he shared the 1993 Nobel Prize in Chemistry with Michael Smith and earned the Japan Prize in the same year.

Mullis, a 1962 graduate of Dreher High School, earned a Bachelor of Science degree in chemistry from the Georgia Institute of Technology and a Ph.D. in biochemistry from the University of California at Berkeley. He was a postdoctoral fellow in pediatric cardiology at the University of Kansas Medical School and also did postdoctoral work in pharmaceutical chemistry at the University of California at San Francisco.

He received a Nobel Prize in chemistry in 1993 for his invention of the polymerase chain reaction (PCR). The process, which Mullis conceptualized in 1983, is hailed as one of the monumental scientific techniques of the 20th Century. PCR, which was the theoretical basis for the novel and motion picture "Jurassic Park" because of its ability to extract DNA from fossils, is the basis of a new scientific discipline called paleobiology. Mullis has authored several major patents. His patented inventions include the PCR technology and UV-sensitive plastic that changes color in response to light. His most recent patent application covers a revolutionary approach to instantly mobilize the immune system to neutralize invading pathogens and toxins, leading to the formation of his latest venture, Altermune, LLC. He is a Distinguished Researcher at the Children's Hospital of Oakland Research Institute in Oakland, Calif.

Notable moments from his 1993 Nobel Prize Autobiography:

We tortured the cows. We sliced apples and slipped them onto the electric fence that contained them in the newer parts of the pasture. Cows like apples and they kept trying.

We could play in the attic...It was a thrilling place during a thunderstorm and, like the hay loft of the barn, a place where my pre-adolescent sexuality concerning my cousin Judy, who was one month my senior, would come a little more sharply into focus. We were only nine or ten, but it was there already with its pressing curiosity. We sometimes kissed.

I was driving with Jennifer Barnett to a cabin I had been building in northern California. She and I had worked and lived together for two years. She was an inspiration to me during that time as only a woman with brains, in the bloom of her womanhood, can be. That morning she had no idea what had just happened. ...It was the first day of the rest of my life.

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