Friday, March 29

this was Kary Mullis, the eccentric creator of the PCR test


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The coronavirus pandemic has made us familiar with the term PCRthe English acronym for ‘Polymerase chain reaction‘, an acronym that had been part of the scientific jargon for a long time and was unknown to many.

It is a molecular biology technique that allows a large number of copies to be obtained from a small fragment. Thanks to this amplification process we can, for example, diagnose hereditary disorders or carry out scientific experiments. Any molecular biology laboratory, no matter how small, has a thermocycler or DNA strand amplifier using PCR.

It was this technique that made it possible to identify the remains of the last Tsar, Nicholas IIassassinated in 1918 and was the one that inspired Michael Crichton for his famed novel ‘jurassic-park‘.

Eccentricity taken to inconceivable extremes

It is true that not all scientists respond to the traditional image of serious and thoughtful people, surely in the minds of many the image of Albert Einsteinwho had an aversion to socks, that of Benjamin Franklin who worked an hour naked every day to give him air or that of Nikola Tesla who professed a pathological love for pigeons. But perhaps the many eccentricities of Kary BanksMullis (1944-2019), the scientist who received the 1993 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for the discovery of CRP.

The truth is that he pointed out ways from a very young age, at the age of twenty-four, after graduating in biochemistry, he published an article in the magazine ‘
Nature
‘ titled: ‘Cosmological significance of time reversal‘.

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And it is that Mullis was throughout his life a provocative, vehement, brazen, unorthodox and controversial scientist to death. He denied climate change, the hole in the ozone layer, and even the existence of HIV.

To this enviable curriculum vitae it should be added that for years he allowed himself to be photographed dressed as a surfer while proclaiming to the four winds that he believed in UFOs, in ghosts and that he drank urgently.

In his messy Nobel acceptance speech, he explained to Swedish academics that he had taken up chemistry because “it was useless to make a living as a writer.”

It was all thanks to an argument

This eccentric character told journalists, on more than one occasion, that he conceived his invention while driving at night in the company of his girlfriend Jenniferwith whom he had just argued.

It all apparently happened on a Friday in April 1983 as I snaked a northern California mountain road in the moonlight: “…excited, I began calculating powers of two in my head: two, four, eight, sixteen, thirty.” and two… I vaguely remembered that two to the power of ten was about a thousand, and therefore two to the power of twenty was about a million. I stopped the car at a turnoff and got a pencil and paper out of the glove compartment. I needed to check my calculations…”

And it is that once again, serendipity, that powerful weapon for science, played a prominent role in a scientific advance. Curiosity coupled with a rare combination of coincidences and, of course, a sharp mind were crucial to such a breakthrough. It should not be forgotten that all the components to carry out PCR had been known for more than a decade when Mullis invented it.

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A psychotropic eureka moment

The American scientist confessed that this genius would never have occurred to him had he not been a regular consumer of another three-letter acronym, the LSD. Mullis considered that thanks to this drug he had become a much more creative scientist.

Apparently, in addition to consuming huge amounts of psychedelic substances, he even synthesized them, taking advantage of his chemical knowledge. That excessive consumption ‘allowed’ him to have contact with an alien raccoon in a forest and share a few beers with his recently deceased grandfather. Very probably Mullis has been the most irreverent Nobel Prize winner in the entire History of Science.

Pedro Gargantilla is an internist at El Escorial Hospital (Madrid) and the author of several popular books.

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