My father, Cecil Banks Mullis, and mother, formerly Bernice Alberta Barker, grew up in rural North Carolina in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains. My dad's family had a general store, which I never saw. My grandparents on his side had already died before I started noticing things.

Kary Mullis

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.

Kary Mullis

Religion is inwardly focused and driven only to sustain itself.

Kary Mullis

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

Kary Mullis

Art is subject to arbitrary fashion.

Kary Mullis

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

Kary Mullis

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.

Kary Mullis

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

Kary Mullis

I'm not driven by being understood.

Kary Mullis

Science grows like a weed every year.

Kary Mullis

Science has not been successful by making up explanations of things that fit with the current social fabric.

Kary Mullis

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

Kary Mullis

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

Kary Mullis

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.

Kary Mullis

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

Kary Mullis

My father, Cecil Banks Mullis, and mother, formerly Bernice Alberta Barker, grew up in rural North Carolina in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains. My dad's family had a general store, which I never saw. My grandparents on his side had already died before I started noticing things.

Kary Mullis

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.

Kary Mullis

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

Kary Mullis

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.

Kary Mullis

My mother often mailed me articles from 'Reader's Digest' about advances in DNA chemistry. No matter how I tried to explain it to her, she never grasped the concept that I could have been writing those articles, that something I had invented made most of those DNA discoveries possible.

Kary Mullis

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

Kary Mullis