Kary Mullis


Kary Banks Mullis was an American biochemist. In recognition of his invention of the polymerase chain reaction technique, he shared the 1993 Nobel Prize in Chemistry with Michael Smith and was awarded the Japan Prize in the same year. His invention became a central technique in biochemistry and molecular biology, described by The New York Times as "highly original and significant, virtually dividing biology into the two epochs of before PCR and after PCR."

Early life

Mullis was born in Lenoir, North Carolina, near the Blue Ridge Mountains, on December 28, 1944. His family had a background in farming in this rural area. As a child, Mullis said, he was interested in observing organisms in the countryside. He grew up in Columbia, South Carolina, where he attended Dreher High School, graduating in the class of 1962. His interest in chemistry started when he learned how to chemically synthesize and build solid fuel propulsion rockets as a high school student during the 1950s.
He earned a B.S. in chemistry from the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta in 1966, during which time he married his first wife and started a business. He earned his Ph.D. in 1973 in biochemistry at the University of California, Berkeley, in J. B. Neilands' laboratory, which focused on synthesis and structure of bacterial iron transporter molecules. As a graduate student, he published a sole-author paper in Nature in the field of astrophysics. Following his graduation, Mullis completed postdoctoral fellowships in pediatric cardiology at the University of Kansas Medical Center and pharmaceutical chemistry at the University of California, San Francisco.

Career

After receiving his doctorate, Mullis briefly left science to write fiction before accepting the University of Kansas fellowship. During his postdoctoral work, he managed a bakery for two years. Mullis returned to science at the encouragement of friend Thomas White, who later helped Mullis land a position with the biotechnology company Cetus Corporation of Emeryville, California. Mullis worked as a DNA chemist at Cetus for seven years; it was there, in 1983, that Mullis invented the polymerase chain reaction. After leaving Cetus in 1986, Mullis served as director of molecular biology for Xytronyx, Inc. in San Diego for two years. While inventing a UV-sensitive ink at Xytronyx, he became skeptical of the existence of the ozone hole.
Mullis served as a consultant for multiple corporations on nucleic acid chemistry. While writing a National Institutes of Health grant progress report on the development of a human immunodeficiency virus test for Specialty Labs, he became skeptical that HIV was the cause of acquired immunodeficiency syndrome. In 1992, Mullis founded a business to sell pieces of jewelry containing the amplified DNA of deceased famous people such as Elvis Presley and Marilyn Monroe. Also in 1992 he founded Atomic Tags, in La Jolla, California. Atomic Tags sought to develop technology using atomic-force microscopy and bar-coded antibodies tagged with heavy metals to create highly multiplexed, parallel immunoassays.
Mullis was a member of the USA Science and Engineering Festival's Advisory Board. In 2014, he was named a distinguished researcher at the Children's Hospital Oakland Research Institute in Oakland, California.

PCR and other inventions

In 1983, Mullis was working for Cetus Corporation as a chemist. Late one night while driving with his girlfriend, who was also a chemist at Cetus, he had the idea to use a pair of primers to bracket the desired DNA sequence and to copy it using DNA polymerase; a technique that would allow rapid amplification of a small stretch of DNA and become a standard procedure in molecular biology laboratories. Cetus took Mullis off his usual projects to concentrate on PCR full-time. Mullis succeeded in demonstrating PCR December 16, 1983. In his Nobel Prize lecture, he remarked that the success did not make up for his girlfriend breaking up with him. "I was sagging as I walked out to my little silver Honda Civic. Neither Fred, empty Beck's bottles, nor the sweet smell of the dawn of the age of PCR could replace Jenny. I was lonesome." He received a $10,000 bonus from Cetus for the invention.
Other Cetus scientists, including Randall Saiki and Henry Erlich, were placed on PCR projects to work on determining if PCR could amplify a specific human gene from genomic DNA. Saiki generated the needed data and Erlich authored the first paper to include utilization of the technique, while Mullis was still working on a paper that would describe PCR itself. Mullis' 1985 paper with R. K. Saiki and H. A. Erlich, "Enzymatic Amplification of β-globin Genomic Sequences and Restriction Site Analysis for Diagnosis of Sickle Cell Anemia"—the polymerase chain reaction invention -- was honored by a Citation for Chemical Breakthrough Award from the Division of History of Chemistry of the American Chemical Society in 2017.
A drawback of the technique was that the DNA polymerase in the reaction was destroyed by the high heat used at the start of each replication cycle and had to be replaced. In 1986, Saiki started to use Thermophilus aquaticus DNA polymerase to amplify segments of DNA. The Taq polymerase was heat resistant and only need to be added to the reaction once, making the technique dramatically more affordable and subject to automation. This modification of Mullis' invention revolutionized biochemistry, molecular biology, genetics, medicine, and forensics.
Mullis also invented a UV-sensitive plastic that changes color in response to light.
He founded Altermune LLC in 2011 to pursue new ideas on the immune system. Mullis described the company's novel technology in a presentation:
The first proof-of-principle of this technology, re-targeting pre-existing antibodies to the surface of a pathogenic strep bacteria using an alpha-gal modified aptamer, was published in 2015 in collaboration with scientists at the University of California, San Diego.

Accreditation of the PCR technique

A concept similar to that of PCR had been described before Mullis' work. Nobel laureate H. Gobind Khorana and Kjell Kleppe, a Norwegian scientist, authored a paper 17 years earlier describing a process they termed "repair replication" in the Journal of Molecular Biology. Using repair replication, Kleppe duplicated and then quadrupled a small synthetic molecule with the help of two primers and DNA polymerase. The method developed by Mullis used repeated thermal cycling, which allowed the rapid and exponential amplification of large quantities of any desired DNA sequence from an extremely complex template. Later a heat-stable DNA polymerase was incorporated into the process.
His co-workers at Cetus, who were embittered by his abrupt departure from the company,
contested that Mullis was solely responsible for the idea of using Taq polymerase in PCR. However, other scientists have written that the "full potential was not realized" until Mullis' work in 1983, and that Mullis' colleagues failed to see the potential of the technique when he presented it to them. As a result, some controversy surrounds the balance of credit that should be given to Mullis versus the team at Cetus. In practice, credit has accrued to both the inventor and the company in the form of a Nobel Prize and a $10,000 Cetus bonus for Mullis and $300 million for Cetus when the company sold the patent to Roche Molecular Systems. After DuPont lost out to Roche on that sale, the company unsuccessfully disputed Mullis' patent on the alleged grounds that PCR had been previously described in 1971. Mullis and Erlich took Cetus' side in the case, and Khorana refused to testify for DuPont; the jury upheld Mullis' patent in 1991. However, in February 1999, the patent of Hoffman-La Roche was found by the courts to be unenforceable, after Dr. Thomas Kunkel testified in the case Hoffman-La Roche v. Promega Corporation on behalf of the defendants that "prior art" existed, in the form of two articles, published by Alice Chien et al. in 1976, and A. S. Kaledin et al. in 1980.
The anthropologist Paul Rabinow wrote a book on the history of the PCR method in 1996 in which he discussed whether Mullis "invented" PCR or "merely" came up with the concept of it. Rabinow, a Foucault scholar interested in issues of the production of knowledge, used the topic to argue against the idea that scientific discovery is the product of individual work, writing, "Committees and science journalists like the idea of associating a unique idea with a unique person, the lone genius. PCR is thought by some to be an example of teamwork, but by others as the genius of one who was smart enough to put things together which were present to all, but overlooked. For Mullis, the light bulb went off, but for others it did not. This is consistent with the idea, that the prepared mind who is careful to observe and not overlook, is what separates the genius scientist from his many also smart scientists. The proof is in the fact that the person who has the light bulb go off never forgets the "Ah!" experience, while the others never had this photochemical reaction go off in their brains."

Personal views

Mullis was quoted saying "the never-ending quest for more grants and staying with established dogmas" has hurt science. He believed that "science is being practiced by people who are dependent on being paid for what they are going to find out," not for what they actually produce. Mullis was described by some as an "impatient and impulsive researcher" who finds routine laboratory work boring and instead thinks about his research while driving and surfing. He came up with the idea of the polymerase chain reaction while driving along a highway.
In his 1998 humorous autobiography, Mullis expressed disagreement with the scientific evidence supporting climate change and ozone depletion, the evidence that HIV causes AIDS, and asserted his belief in astrology.
Mullis claimed climate change and the HIV/AIDS connection are due to a conspiracy of environmentalists, government agencies, and scientists attempting to preserve their careers and earn money, rather than scientific evidence.
Mullis has been criticized for his association with HIV skeptic Peter Duesberg, claiming that AIDS is an arbitrary diagnosis used when HIV antibodies are found in a patient's blood. The medical and scientific consensus is that Duesberg's hypothesis is pseudoscience, HIV having been conclusively proven to be the cause of AIDS and that global warming is occurring because of human activities. Seth Kalichman, AIDS researcher and author of Denying AIDS, " that it seems odd to include a Nobel laureate among the who's who of AIDS pseudoscientists". Mullis also wrote the foreword to the book What If Everything You Thought You Knew About AIDS Was Wrong? by Christine Maggiore, an HIV-positive AIDS denialist who, along with her 3-years-old daughter, died of an AIDS-related illness. A New York Times article listed Mullis as one of several scientists who, after success in their area of research, go on to make unfounded, sometimes bizarre statements in other areas. An article in the Skeptical Inquirer described Mullis as an "AIDS denialist with scientific credentials has never done any scientific research on HIV or AIDS." However, he consulted for Specialty Labs, in Santa Monica, developing a nucleic acid based HIV test. While writing a NIH grant progress report, he was unable to find a peer-reviewed reference that HIV was the cause of AIDS. Mullis published an alternative theory of AIDS in 1994. He questioned the scientific validity of the link between HIV and AIDS, leading some to label him an "AIDS denialist."

Use of hallucinogens

Mullis detailed his experiences synthesizing and testing various psychedelic amphetamines and a difficult trip on DET in his autobiography. In a Q&A interview published in the September 1994 issue of California Monthly, Mullis said, "Back in the 1960s and early 1970s I took plenty of LSD. A lot of people were doing that in Berkeley back then. And I found it to be a mind-opening experience. It was certainly much more important than any courses I ever took." During a symposium held for centenarian Albert Hofmann, Hofmann said Mullis had told him that LSD had "helped him develop the polymerase chain reaction that helps amplify specific DNA sequences".

Personal life

Known for his quick wit and colorful stories, Mullis enjoyed surfing. He married four times, and had a total of three children by two of his wives. At the time of his death, he had two grandchildren. He used profanities to make a point and often said, "Oh, Lord," in response to the absurdities experienced in life. Mullis reported an encounter with a "standard extraterrestrial raccoon" at his cabin in the woods of northern California around midnight one night in 1985; he denied being on psychedelic drugs at the time.
Mullis died of pneumonia on August 7, 2019 at age 74 in Newport Beach, California.

Publications and books