D N A SURF
"THE SUN HAD been hot that day in Mendocino County. A dry wind had come out of the east, and nobody knew how hot it had been until, around sunset, the wind stopped. I drove up from Berkeley through Cloverdale headed to Anderson Valley. The California buckeyes poked heavy blossoms out into Highway 128. The pink and white stalks hanging down into my headlights looked cold, but they were loaded with warmed oils that dominated the dimension of smell. It seemed to be the night of the buckeyes, but something else was stirring."
"My little silver Honda's front tires pulled us through the mountains. My hands felt the road and the turns. My mind drifted back to the lab. DNA chains coiled and floated. Lurid blue and pink images of electric molecules injected themselves somewhere between the mountain road and my eyes."--Opening words, Dancing Naked in the Mind Field, © 1998, by [Kary Mullis], Pantheon Books.
Dr. Kary Mullis' invention of the elegant technique, polymerase chain reaction (PCR), won him the Nobel Prize in chemistry in 1993. PCR is a simple, revolutionary method of selectively multiplying and mass-producing specific DNA segments in a very short period of time. Mullis' pot-smoking, acid-tripping (during which he saw a universe of antimatter), surfer-punk-scientest lifestyle has ROCKED the world of science for years. Now he's taking on the AIDS establishment. [Celia Farber talks to the rebel genius].
