Nobel Prize speech from the inventor of PCR, Kary Mullis (1993)
nobelprize.org
nobelprize.org
It’s the dark truth. Most scientists and doctors are basically frauds. They just memorize what the real scientists have figured out so far.
> Monday morning I was in the library. The moment of truth. By afternoon it was clear. For whatever reasons, there was nothing in the abstracted literature about succeeding or failing to amplify DNA by the repeated reciprocal extension of two primers hybridized to the separate strands of a particular DNA sequence. By the end of the week I had talked to enough molecular biologists to know that I wasn’t missing anything really obvious. No one could recall such a process ever being tried.
> However, shocking to me, not one of my friends or colleagues would get excited over the potential for such a process. True. I was always having wild ideas, and this one maybe looked no different than last week’s. But it WAS different. There was not a single unknown in the scheme. Every step involved had been done already. Everyone agreed that you could extend a primer on a DNA template, everyone knew you could melt double stranded DNA. Everyone agreed that what you could do once, you could do again.
That people were unimpressed until the point of demonstration is just rational. If someone were excited and impressed by every promising-sounding hypothetical they would end up on a lot of wild goose chases.
I don't think any of this shows any deficiency in the scientific community. Quite the opposite. A strange guy with off-beat ideas was able to come in and demonstrate an achievement, and he was awarded recognition for it and his technology adopted on a widespread basis.
On one hand he did create one of the most revolutionary technologies of the 20th century, the PCR.
OTOH he was a denier of the HIV virus role as a cause of Aids and actively supported South Africa's president Tabo Mbeki on a disastrous policy of ignoring the transmission of the disease.
I take that everyone's opinions must always be taken cautiously, even the opinion of smart men in their own areas of expertise.
PCR is an amazing idea. It’s inventor was a deeply weird guy with a large pile of really bad ideas and an even larger pile of not-even-false ones (e.g., the raccoon spirit animal thing).
Like Pauling, or Watson, a lesson to learn here is that just because someone got a Nobel for true and legit reasons doesn’t mean that what they have to say about other things is of the same caliber. Or even in the same neighborhood of that caliber. Or that a Nobel is a mark of moral character, or anything of that sort.
See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Margaret_Court#Post_tennis_car...
The white Nobel committee considers this a worthy endeavor.
And we seem to have a contender for Obama's supposed results, from the other world superpower.
Also, are you counting Bush's invasion of Iraq as something Obama started? Where are you getting those numbers?
He pointed out a mistake he made during the Challenger investigation that the media took as "must be true because a Nobel prize winner says so".
In my experience the more intelligent a person is the more likely they are to believe bizarre and extremely heterodox things.
One of my issues with the modern skeptic movement has always been how they try to whitewash the history of science and engineering and forget about all the wild ass shit all these people believed (and that present-day scientists and engineers believe when you get a few beers into them).
we as a society do it to everyone; it’s a great way to neuter radicals, mostly to our disservice.
Like, what do you want me to do, refuse to have a COVID test because the guy who figured out how to make it work had some extremely bad ideas about HIV? I assert without proof that i could find someone making that claim somewhere deep in the depths of alternet or salon or tumblr, but i think it's specious.
A worldview that admits of more complexity and tangled-up-ness is more robust against that kind of insanity.
Perhaps there's a different lesson here: at some level of intelligence, you pierce through the patterns of stability your fellow men had weaved for their survival and sanity (and yours). And then anything goes.
Maybe you also realize the "should of giants" are really the shoulders of men? Capricious and agenda-driven and haphazard, if you care to zoom in with enough resolution.
For Christmas I got Freeman Dyson's "Disturbing the Universe". I never realized how poetic the man was. I always admired Dyson for his courage to speak out and his scientific insight, but he makes beautiful connections between poetry and science, Faust and Newton, creativity and sanity, integrity and death (he served in WW2 and died last year). A chillingly honest and humane read.
I take a different conclusion from the facts you present, but I know better than to get into it in HN, other than maybe to say: wow, lots of the primary discoverers of scientific principles, and inventors of basic technology, had this shamanic side, maybe there's something to that.
You're probably getting dinged for describing Shockley as "basically a Nazi". I mean, I hope it's not for describing Henry Ford that way, since yeah, that's accurate. Shockley sued someone for that characterization and won. I'd hazard that characterizing him as a racist, and proponent of eugenics, would be less controversial; I'm not at all interested in litigating William Shockley's reputation.
Worth point out, though, that both Ford and Shockley were pretty boring "normies" whose opinions were widely held by others. So your point would have been better made by dropping the first sentence, or even burying it a bit further down.
By academic credentials, Mullis was a 3rd rate scientist. Then he had that one brilliant invention. Then he went back to being almost a crackpot.
For comparison, the inventor of the fundamentals of the now famous mRNA vaccine technology, Katalin Karikó, was 2nd rate scientist by academic credentials. Could not get tenured permanent position, but was able to stay employed in the normal workforce at a university.
Of course, by scientific importance they are both first rate scientists, because of their important inventions.
The fact that Mullis made a huge discovery and is also a third rate scientist and crackpot are not mutually exclusive.
I did a deep dive into this back in the 90s, during the course of which I had a chance to talk to Kary. I looked up his phone number on the internet (this was long before doxxing was a thing), cold-called him, and he picked up the phone. We talked for about half an hour. That's the kind of guy he was. I more or less asked him how can a smart guy like you buy into this conspiracy theory? His answer was: he wasn't buying in to the conspiracy theory. He was not endorsing the idea that HIV did not cause AIDS. All he believed was that there was not yet enough data to conclusively show that HIV was the cause, and so people should keep an open mind. And frankly, given what was known at the time, I thought he had a valid point.
That is far from clear, at least to me. The main thing that bothered me at the time, and which I've never seen satisfactorily explained, is that 1) AIDS was widely believed to be 100% fatal, 2) believed to be caused by HIV, but 3) the HIV virus had incubation periods of [EDIT: up to] ten years or more. I don't see any way to validly conclude that HIV causes AIDS at a time when the virus had only been known for ten years or so. One could advance this as a plausible hypothesis (one which ultimately proved to be correct), but in the mid-90s I think there was still room for valid doubt.
But I'm very open to being convinced that I was wrong about this (not that it matters much at this point, but it is of historical interest to me).
So yes, median of 12 years. Not minimum.
Wikipedia's entry on HIV/AIDS denialism links to this document from a committee organized by the National Academy of Sciences in 1988 where the committee says they find the evidence of a causal link between HIV and AIDS conclusive (page 33): https://www.nap.edu/read/771/chapter/4 The rest of that section explains the evidence they have: extremely high correlates for HIV infection and subsequent AIDS prevalence in at-risk communities, no cases in populations that were not at risk, near 100% detection rate of HIV in the blood of AIDS patients, and the tracing of HIV infected blood donors to transfusion patients acquiring AIDS.
I didn't say minimum. The point is, in the mid-90s you had a lot of people with HIV infections. Some of them were dying, but a lot of others carried infections for many years with no apparent ill effects. I don't see how you can get definitive causality from that data.
From the HN guidelines:
"Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith."
No, it didn't. If you think that then you haven't understood my argument. Let me try again:
HIV was first identified in 1983, so by the mid-90s the virus had been known for just a little over 10 years. Part of the prevailing hypothesis at the time was that the virus occasionally had incubation periods in excess of 10 years, but that it would inevitably kill you sooner or later. I do not see, on the basis of the data available at the time, how you could definitively rule out the possibility that, for example, some people could successfully defend against HIV indefinitely based on some to-that-point unidentified immunological mechanism. Or that AIDS was caused by some unidentified factor that weakened the immune system, and that HIV was an opportunistic infection that was harmless if you happened to have it without the actual unidentified causal factor for AIDS. Or maybe HIV was a co-factor. I can think of a lot of possibilities that AFAICT could not have been definitively ruled out based on what was known in 1995.
Yes, the establishment got it right. But it is far from clear to me that it wasn't for the wrong reasons. The history of science is full of examples of the establishment getting it wrong. It's possible they just got lucky with HIV.
Moreover if what you disapprove of is the standard of evidence demonstrated by the medical community at the time then I think I can understand that even if I disagree with it. What I can't understand is why you think this is relevant to why Kary Mullis was a denialist, since it's clear he remained as such long after the evidence was overwhelming, the mechanism was demonstrated, etc.
(Side note: I actually wrote a screen play based on this premise: http://www.flownet.com/ron/control.pdf, though that's a bit of a spoiler alert.)
one of the alternative hypotheses was that the treatments then being given for HIV were actually killing people
That's plain bonkers. AZT was a miracle drug.
That hypothesis was advanced and defended by Peter Duesberg, a professor of molecular and cell biology at the University of California, Berkeley. In retrospect we can tell that Duesberg was obviously wrong, but to simply dismiss it as "plain bonkers" is being far too facile.
Of course the virus evolved to defeat the medication, and the disease came back, that's why we nowadays use combination therapy.
You'd really like to know why, despite the obvious successes of combination therapy, Duisberg continued to advance his theory, by 2000 it was totally disproved.
He wrote a book about it:
https://www.amazon.com/Inventing-AIDS-Virus-Peter-Duesberg/d...
Yes, it's an interesting question why Duesberg never admitted he was wrong. But that's a separate question.
As a process in its truest form, it works. And we should all be very glad of that, and use it as a lesson to be aware of how biased we can be, and how a biased person can still wield the tools to arrive at the truth.
http://library.sciencemadness.org/library/books/gergel_isopr...
The area where the Columbia Organic Chemicals Company was located was restored in 2007-2008. "A total of 1,436.40 tons of soil was removed and disposed of."
From the speech:
> There were no government regulators to stifle our fledgling efforts, and it was a golden age, but we didn’t notice it.
> In Berkeley it drizzles in the winter. Avocados ripen at odd times and the tree in Fred’s front yard was wet and sagging from a load of fruit. I was sagging as I walked out to my little silver Honda Civic, which never failed to start. Neither Fred, empty Becks bottles, nor the sweet smell of the dawn of the age of PCR could replace Jenny. I was lonesome.
Mary was quite the captivating character and there’s a number of other speeches and interviews on YouTube, as well.
It was audio only and just had a static slide of the US penny-resembling Nobel logo on a white background for the "video".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kary_Mullis#Use_of_hallucinoge...
This guy is a genius.
Ever thankful for heat stable polymerases.