The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 1993   Kary B. Mullis, Michael Smith  Nobel Lecture Nobel Lecture, December 8, 1993

In 1953, when Jim Watson and Francis Crick published the structure of DNA, Schroedinger's little book What is Life? and I were eight years old. I was too young to notice that mankind had finally understood how it might be that "like begat like." The book had been reprinted three times. I was living in Columbia S.C., where no one noticed that we didn't have a copy. But my home was a few blocks away from an undeveloped wooded area with a creek, possums, racoons, poisonous snakes, dragons, and a railroad track. We didn't need a copy. It was a wilderness for me and my brothers, an unknown and unregimented place to grow up. And if we got bored of the earth, we could descend into the network of storm drains under the city. We learned our way around that dark, subterranean labyrinth. It always frightened us. And we always loved it.

After six years I headed east with a Ph. D. and confidence in my education. My wife of a few months went to Kansas to go to medical school and I followed her there. That was 1972. I had made no professional plans that would work in Kansas, so I decided to become a writer. I discovered pretty quickly that I was far too young. I didn't know anything yet about tragedy, and my characters were flat. I didn't know how to describe a mean spirit in terms someone else could believe.

So I had to get a job as a scientist. I found one at the medical school working with two pediatric cardiologists and a pathologist. It was a very fortunate accident. For one thing pediatricians are always the nicest doctors, and for another thing these doctors were very special: Leone Mattioli, whose wife could cook, Agostino Molteni and Richard Zakheim. For two years I did medical research, learned how to appreciate Old World values from two Italians and a New York Jew, and learned human biology for the first time.

Play! Experiment! Discover!  - Transcript TED2002 · 29:32 · Filmed Feb 2002

that... process is what I think of as science, see, where you start with some idea, and then instead of, like, looking up, every authority that you've ever heard of I -- sometimes you do that, if you're going to write a paper later, you want to figure out who else has worked on it. But in the actual process, you get an idea -- like, when I got the idea one night that I could amplify DNA with two oligonucleotides,and I could make lots of copies of some little piece of DNA, you know, the thinking for that was about 20 minutes while I was driving my car, and then instead of going -- I went back and I did talk to people about it, but if I'd listened to what I heard from all my friends who were molecular biologists -- I would have abandoned it. You know, if I had gone back looking for an authority figure who could tell me if it would work or not, he would have said, no, it probably won't. Because the results of it were so spectacular that if it worked it was going to change everybody's goddamn way of doing molecular biology. Nobody wants a chemist to come in and poke around in their stuff like that and change things. But if you go to authority, and you always don't -- you don't always get the right answer, see. But I knew, you'd go into the lab and you'd try to make it work yourself. And then you're the authority, and you can say, I know it works, because right there in that tube is where it happened, and here, on this gel, there's a little band there that I know that's DNA, and that's the DNA I wanted to amplify, so there! So it does work. You know, that's how you do science. And then you say, well, what can make it work better? And then you figure out better and better ways to do it. But you always work from, from like, facts that you have made available to you by doing experiments: things that you could do on a stage

Play! Experiment! Discover!  - Transcript TED2002 · 29:32 · Filmed Feb 2002

At any rate, when I was a boy, I, like, for instance, I had this -- I got this little book from Fort Sill, Oklahoma -- ….. I was thinking about making my own little rockets. And I knew that frogs -- little frogs -- had aspirations of space travel, just like people. And I -- (Laughter) I was looking for a -- a propulsion system that would like, make a rocket, like, maybe about four feet high go up a couple of miles. And, I mean, that was my sort of goal. I wanted it to go out of sight and then I wanted this little parachute to come back with the frog in it. And -- I -- I -- I got this book from Fort Sill, Oklahoma, where there's a missile base. They send it out for amateur rocketeers, and it said in there do not ever heat a mixture of potassium perchlorate and sugar. (Laughter) You know, that's what you call a lead. (Laughter) You sort of -- now you say, well, let's see if I can get hold of some potassium chlorate and sugar, perchlorate and sugar, and heat it; it would be interesting to see what it is they don't want me to do, and what it is going to -- and how is it going to work. And we didn't have -- like, my mother presided over the back yard from an upstairs window, where she would be ironing or something like that. And she was usually just sort of keeping an eye on, and if there was any puffs of smoke out there, she'd lean out and admonish us all not to blow our eyes out. That was her -- You know, that was kind of the worst thing that could happen to us. That's why I thought, as long as I don't blow my eyes out... I may not care about the fact that it's prohibited from heating this solution. I'm going to do it carefully, but I'll do it.
It's like anything else that's prohibited: you do it behind the garage.

Play! Experiment! Discover!  - Transcript TED2002 · 29:32 · Filmed Feb 2002

There's a lot of little things involved in making a rocket that it will actually work, even after you have the fuel. But you do it, by -- what I just-- you know, you do experiments, and you write down things sometimes, you make observations, you know. And then you slowly build up a theory of how this stuff works. And it was -- I was following all the rules. I didn't know what the rules were, I'm a natural born scientist, I guess, or some kind of a throwback to the 17th century, whatever. But at any rate, we finally did have a device that would reproduceably [sic] put a frog out of sight and get him back alive. And we had not -- I mean, we weren't frightened by it. We should have been, because it made a lot of smoke and it made a lot of noise, and it was powerful, you know. And once in a while, they would blow up. But I wasn't worried, by the way, about, you know, the explosion causing the destruction of the planet. …. -- By the way, I could have thought, I'd better not do this because they say not to, you know. And I'd better get permission from the government. If I'd have waited around for that, I would have never -- the frog would have died, you know.

And I moved down to La Jolla and learned how to surf. And I started living down there on the beach for a long time. And when surfers are out waiting for waves, you probably wonder, if you've never been out there, what are they doing? You know, sometimes there's a 10-, 15-minute break out there when you're waiting for a wave to come in………….

At any rate, I bring it up because it's a good story, and he said, tell personal things, you know, and that's a personal -- I was going to tell you about the first night that I met my wife, but that would be too personal, wouldn't it.

In one of our last experiments before we became so interested in the maturing young women around us that we would not think deeply about rocket fuels for another ten years, we blasted a frog a mile into the air and got him back alive. In another, we inadvertently frightened an airline pilot, who was preparing to land a DC-3 at Columbia airport. Our mistake.

…… And no tricky shit behind the thing. I mean, it's all -- you've got to be very honest with what you're doing if it really is going to work. I mean, you can't make up results, and then do another experiment based on that one. So you have to be honest. And I'm basically honest. I have a fairly bad memory, and dishonesty would always get me in trouble, if I, like -- so I've just sort of been naturally honest and naturally inquisitive, and that sort of leads to that kind of science.

Play! Experiment! Discover!  - Transcript TED2002 · 29:32 · Filmed Feb 2002

 And everybody stepped back a little and said, you know, we ought to invest in this shit, because whoever has got the most of these people working in the places is going to have a dominant position, at least in the military, and probably in all kind of economic ways. And they got involved in it, and the scientific and industrial establishment was born, and out of that came a lot of scientists who were in there for the money, you know, because it was suddenly available.
And they weren't the curious little boys that liked to put frogs up in the air. They were the same people that later went in to medical school, you know, because there was money in it, you know. ... there are waves of -- going into your high school, person saying, you want to be rich, you know, be a scientist. .... But a lot of people got in it for the money and the power and the travel. That's back when travel was easy. And those people don't think -- they don't -- they don't always tell you the truth, you know. There is nothing in their contract, in fact, that makes it to their advantage always, to tell you the truth.