73 Quotes by Kary Mullis

Religion is inwardly focused and driven only to sustain itself.

I went to high school in Columbia. I met my first wife, Richards, whom I married while I was working on a B.S. in chemistry at Georgia Tech. She bore Louise, and I studied. I learned most of the useful technical things - math, physics, chemistry - that I now use during those four years.

I've been writing about my boyhood, when I was a little kid back on my grandfather's farm where we didn't know about black widow spiders or all that stuff. But writing about that is so easy.

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.

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.

Until I was five, my immediate family lived near my grandfather's farm where my mother had grown up and, with the exception of a few modern conveniences, had not changed a lot over the years.

Somebody is dying of anthrax and would like to be immune right now,

I hate this kind of crap. I'd like to write about something that's easy to write about, where you don't have to come up with a conclusion in the end.

You don't discover the cause of something like AIDS by dealing with incredibly obscure things. You just look at what the hell is going on.