Kary Mullis, Ph.D., is no longer alive, having died of pneumonia on August 7th, 2019. But he is certainly rolling in his grave.
Kary Mullis invention
Kary Mullis invented the polymerase chain reaction (PCR) technique in 1985, for which he won a Nobel Prize and a Japan Prize. PCR is the process where a single DNA molecule can be amplified so it’s large enough to study in detail. Recently, it’s been used to determine if you carry the SARS-CoV-2 virus, also known as COVID-19.
Kary Mullis thought of the PCR technique while driving a stretch of highway in California one night. He credits computer programming for planting the seed. Like a loop function that repeats itself exponentially, Mullis realized he could do the same thing with DNA.
His LSD usage and thoughts about cannabis
He also credits the hallucinogenic drug lysergic acid diethylamide. Known as LSD or acid, it expanded his consciousness enough to think outside the box. But before he could drop acid, his friend with the LSD said he must smoke cannabis.
Cannabis “scared me,” Mullis writes in his autobiography, Running Naked in the Mind Field. “Everything I’d read about it said that it was a bad drug, an addictive drug — one toke and you’re a slave for life.”[1]
Kary Mullis soon realized that was all false. He embraced cannabis, acid, nitrous oxide, Beck’s beer. He was also a womanizer – married four times and some of those marriages were “open”. He lived in California. He loved surfing. He was the quintessential hippie-baby-boomer rad scientist if there ever was one.
Kary Mullis autobiography “Running Naked”
Never one to bite his tongue in respectable company, Running Naked recounts some hilarious stories from his less-than-conventional life. There are twenty-two chapters and they are all fairly short. The book itself is 240 pages and can be read in a few hours. Mullis covers everything from how he invented PCR to his childhood curiosity and stories from the lab.
From reading the book, there is no doubt what Kary Mullis would say about his invention being used to diagnose people with a virus. Although he doesn’t mention Dr. Anthony Fauci in Running Naked, there are interviews with him online where he does. None of it praise.
In Running Naked,
Mullis describes how connecting HIV – Human Immunodeficiency Virus – with AIDS was done through bad science and politics. The similarities to the current COVID situation are uncanny.
In 1984, Mullis was working in Santa Monica, using PCR to detect retroviruses in blood donations received by the Red Cross. While writing a report on his progress, he began by stating, “HIV is the probable cause of AIDS,” and that’s as far as he got. Mullis needed a reference. “You don’t need a reference,” a virologist told him, “Everybody knows it.”
Kary Mullis found the original CDC report and read it.
It wasn’t a scientific paper. It didn’t state how HIV caused AIDS. It just asserted the fact. So Mullis dug deeper. But by the 1980s, scientific magazines were printed on “slick glossy paper with pictures on the front and lots of advertisements, a lot of editorial material by people who are professional journalists, and a few pictures of girls selling you things you might want to buy for your lab.” Mullis writes that “There are no major journals without advertisements. Therefore, there are no major journals without corporate connections.”[2]
The media had dubbed Luc Montagnier (of Pasteur Institute in Paris) and Robert Gallo (of the National Institutes of Health), the “AIDS doctors.” Mullis referenced everything they published. He looked for experiments that could be repeated. All he found was evidence of antibodies. As he writes in Dancing Naked,
“Antibodies to viruses had always been considered evidence of past disease, not present disease. Antibodies signaled that the virus had been defeated. The patient had saved himself. There was no indication in these papers that this virus caused a disease. They didn’t show that everybody with the antibodies had the disease. In fact, they found some healthy people with antibodies.”[3]
Eccentric as he was, Mullis wasn’t trying to be a contrarian. He simply wanted to quantify the statement that “HIV is the probable cause of AIDS” with scientific evidence that would support it. Since there were (and still are) tens of thousands of scientists spending billions of dollars on research for this idea, Mullis asked around. It was settled science but no one could cite any real evidence.
Mullis had opportunity to ask Dr. Montagnier when the doctor lectured in San Diego. Montagnier suggested Mullis read the CDC report. Eventually Mullis, through the help of a scientist at Berkeley, concluded there was no linking HIV to AIDS.
Dr. Robert Gallo was a bad scientist but good at politics. He worked his way up the power structure. In 1984, the Reagan administration called a press conference and introduced Gallo to the world. Similar to our recent introduction to Tony Fauci. Mullis says once “HIV causes AIDS” became the mainstream narrative, once Bob Gallo became a household name, many cancer researchers became AIDS researchers. President Reagan partitioned almost a billion dollars into this venture. Anybody who claimed to be doing HIV/AIDS research could apply for the grants.
Although Kary Mullis died half a year before the Western world started placing healthy people under house arrest, and his autobiography was written well before that, Mullis’s personality shines through each page. There is no doubt what his thoughts on the current COVID narrative would be. No doubt what he would think of his PCR test being misused for political ends.
PCR is sound science. Using it as a diagnosis tool on healthy people is not. If you die of natural causes and your corpse tests positive for COVID – that counts toward the COVID death toll. Likewise, if an HIV-positive woman develops uterine cancer, she is considered to have AIDS. If she is not HIV-positive, then it’s uterine cancer. According to Mullis.
And just as new variants of COVID are presumed to be deadlier, the CDC adds new diseases to the AIDS definition. Since the mid-80s, the CDC has been adding to the definition to make it appear as if AIDS continues to spread more than it actually has.
To all this, Mullis writes,
“Science as it is practiced today in the world is largely not science at all. What people call science is probably very similar to what was called science in 1634. Galileo was told to recant his beliefs or be excommunicated. People who refuse to accept the commandments of the AIDS establishment are basically told the same thing. ‘If you don’t accept what we say, you’re out.’”[4]
Using acid and other drugs broke Kary Mullis’s brain, some might say. To these people, his PCR invention was a fluke. If he hadn’t thought of it, someone else would have. At most, he was a one-hit-wonder. You only need to look at his unconventional beliefs regarding HIV/AIDS, global warming, aliens, or astrology and it becomes clear. This biochemist could have served the world better if he’d stuck to his lane.
I couldn’t disagree more. Kary Mullis was brilliant even when he was wrong. He may not have been the polymath he thought himself as. But he was a breath of fresh air in a stale, regimented, research environment. And he still is, after his death. If more scientists or journalists thought like him the world would certainly be less dogmatic. Science is not an institution run by experts you shouldn’t question.
As Mullis writes in his 1998 autobiography,
“We accept the proclamations of scientists in their lab coats with the same faith once reserved for priests. We have asked them to commit the same atrocities that the priests did when they were in charge… Scientists could be something to entertain us and invent nice things for us. They don’t have to be justifying their existence by scaring us out of our wits.”[5]
1 – Chapter 17, page 164
2 – Chapter 18, page 172
3 – Chapter 18, page 118
4 – Chapter 18, page 180
5 – Chapter 11, page 119