Kary Mullis obituary (2024)

Kary Mullis was excluded from the trial of OJ Simpson because it was felt that his participation would create a lurid spectacle. Even for a globally televised event that seemed at times more suited to a circus than a courtroom, the small army of lawyers defending the former American football star and actor decided that Mullis was too sensational to take the stand.

They withdrew plans for the biochemist to appear as an expert witness when the prosecution made it clear they would argue that his singularities undermined his scientific credentials.

Since Mullis had won the Nobel prize for chemistry less than two years earlier, casting doubt on his competence was an audacious approach. However, despite his luminosity in the field of DNA, Mullis was known to partake in the sort of chemical experiments that would be more likely to attract the interest of the police than the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.

Even entering his fifties he used LSD several times a year, he said. “I find it’s one of those things that keeps your mind from getting really old,” he told California Monthly magazine in 1994, the year before Simpson was acquitted on two counts of murder.

The defence wanted Mullis to cast doubt on the reliability of the DNA testing of blood samples by the authorities. Yet they had second thoughts about calling him to testify after prosecutors filed a motion declaring they would “cross-examine Mullis on every aspect of his life which reflects on his credibility, competency and sobriety”.

In the end, the attorneys decided, Mullis was too risky, too quirky. And this was years before he published an autobiography in which he related a trippy encounter with a glowing, talking and possibly alien raccoon.

Mullis invented polymerase chain reaction (PCR), a way for molecular biologists to use heating and cooling cycles to make millions of copies of even a small amount of DNA in a couple of hours or less. These amplified segments have a variety of uses, such as forensic analysis, medical diagnosis, archaeological sampling and DNA sequencing.

PCR was nothing short of a revolutionary breakthrough. Jurassic Park, the 1990 Michael Crichton novel about cloned dinosaurs that became a blockbuster film series, is often cited as an example of a fictional work that relies on technology inspired by Mullis for its central thesis. In the real world PCR has proved important in solving crimes and exonerating the wrongly convicted through DNA analysis, including several American death-row inmates.

However, prosecutors were more interested in exploring his life away from the laboratory. Visiting his oceanside flat in the affluent La Jolla neighbourhood of San Diego for a profile in the year before the trial, a reporter with Esquire magazine depicted a man who relished female company and was convivial to a fault.

The journalist noted a stack of 15 or so microcassettes next to his dining area. Whenever his answering machine filled up he tossed the unheard recordings on to the pile. “After unlocking the secrets of DNA, the prizewinning biochemist traded in his centrifuge for a life of wine, women, and surf,” the article noted. “Besides, babes really dig a Nobel.”

Mullis sat in court for several days without being called to testify. In his memoir, Dancing Naked in the Mind Field (1998), on the cover of which he is pictured with a surfboard, he recalled a brief encounter with Simpson after court was adjourned one afternoon. “An article about me in Esquire had included a photograph of my kitchen. On my refrigerator were pictures I had taken of several women who had passed through my life, some of them without clothes,” Mullis wrote.

“OJ asked me about the woman who graced the upper right-hand corner. ‘She’s gotten married,’ I told him. He offered his condolences. I never asked him about the killings. It’s a tough subject to broach even in a courtroom.”

Mullis was awarded an equal share of the Nobel with Michael Smith, a British-born Canadian biochemist who died in 2000. On hearing about the honour, Mullis celebrated by going surfing and embarking on a two-day bender. He was later honoured at the White House, briefly meeting the president Bill Clinton and the first lady. “It’s easy to understand how he got elected, but Hillary’s the smart one,” Mullis wrote.

His DNA epiphany came in 1983 during a long drive with his girlfriend at the time in his Honda Civic through northern California from Berkeley to Mendocino, where he had a cabin in the woods. “I stopped the car at mile marker 46.7 on Highway 128. In the glove compartment I found some paper and a pen,” he recalled in his Nobel lecture. “We got to my cabin and I started drawing little diagrams on every horizontal surface that would take pen, pencil or crayon until dawn, when with the aid of a last bottle of good Mendocino County cabernet, I settled into a perplexed semiconsciousness . . . I had solved the most annoying problems in DNA chemistry in a single lightning bolt.”

Kary Banks Mullis was born in 1944 in Lenoir, North Carolina, to Cecil, a furniture salesman, and Bernice (née Barker), an estate agent. He and his brothers spent their free time outdoors, exploring a nearby wood and creek and wandering through storm drains. In the early Sixties they tinkered in their high school’s chemistry lab and built rockets powered with dynamite fuses, including one that “blasted a frog a mile into the air and got him back alive,” he said. “Today we would be thought of as a menace to society.”

He graduated from the Georgia Institute of Technology in 1966 with a degree in chemistry. While studying there he married his first wife, Richards Haley. The union ended in divorce, but produced a daughter, Louise. Mullis took a PhD in biochemistry at the University of California, Berkeley. As a student in the San Francisco area in the late Sixties he was well placed to pursue a recreational interest in mind-altering substances.

He moved to Kansas City to be with his second wife, Gail Hubbell, a medical student; they divorced after three years. Mullis worked in a paediatric cardiology unit, nurturing ambitions of becoming a writer and topping up his income by donating sperm to an artificial insemination clinic. In Kansas he met his third wife, Cynthia Gibson, a nursing student. They married in 1976 and had two boys, Christopher and Jeremy, before separating in 1981.

Mullis worked in a bakery in Berkeley before starting two years of work in pharmaceutical chemistry at the University of California, San Francisco. He grew intrigued by DNA synthesis after attending a seminar and in 1979 was hired by Cetus, an early biotechnology company.

As PCR took off, Mullis resented the level of credit given to colleagues who helped to develop it. He also regretted not finding a way to make more money from his invention. Cetus paid him a $10,000 bonus, then sold the rights to a pharmaceutical company for $300 million. He left Cetus in 1986 and worked as a consultant and lecturer.

His iconoclasm led him towards some ill-judged stances, such as his scepticism about mankind’s role in climate change and the link between HIV and Aids. His performance when he gave a lecture in 1994 at a medical conference in Spain elicited a dyspeptic letter to the journal Nature from the president of the European Society for Clinical Investigation.

Not only did Mullis talk about HIV instead of PCR, “his only slides (on what he called ‘his art’) were photographs he had taken of naked women with coloured lights projected on their bodies”, John Martin wrote. “He accused science of being universally corrupt with widespread falsification of data to obtain grants.”

After the Nobel he co-founded StarGene, a company that made jewellery implanted with the DNA of the rich and famous. For $195 it offered a pocket watch featuring a “genestone” decoratively housing a microscopic DNA copy replicated from a lock of Abraham Lincoln’s hair. StarGene planned to offer DNA samples from Marilyn Monroe, James Dean, Elvis Presley, Albert Einstein and the like.

In his later years he pursued an interest in immunology and in 1998 married his fourth wife, Nancy (née Cosgrove), a painter he met through a friend. He described her as a calming influence; she survives him with his children.

Even the crowning moments of his career were not without incident. He claimed to have called the empress consort of Japan “sweetie” when accepting the Japan Prize in 1993.

When in Stockholm for the Nobel ceremony he aimed the red dot of a laser pointer at passers-by beneath the window of his room in the Grand Hotel. This led to an urgent visit from the police, given that a would-be serial killer had shot multiple people in the city the year before using a rifle with a laser sight. Still, Mullis wrote, “most of the time I behaved myself very well”.

Kary Mullis, biochemist, was born on December 28, 1944. He died of pneumonia on August 7, 2019, aged 74