kary mullis died like a month ago and i’m appalled that Nature or Science hasn’t done like a glowing obituary, or any at all, that i’ve seen, which is super shitty of them imo.
because not only was he a nobel prize-winning scientist who absolutely revolutionized biological research in a way that i cannot understate. pcr, a technique of amplifying dna to quickly visualize what specific dna is in any cell, was thought up by this dude while hanging out on a beach on lsd. looking out at the ocean gave him an epiphany and he wrote it down on the dashboard of his friend’s car and when he sobered up it turned out to be completely feasible. he also synthesized his own psychedelics and documented testing them on himself which is really putting his body on the line, you gotta give it to him, he loved science and techno music.
and probably because he earnestly claimed to have communicated with extraterrestrial aliens via a glowing raccoon, and denied climate change and didn’t believe that hiv caused aids, the scientific community appears to have shunned him. and that’s a shame, because was always eccentric. when he was a master’s student he wrote an article for Nature about how half the universe is going back in time and they fuckin published it. and who are you to say it’s not? where’s your nobel prize? anyway my point is we should still respect and recognize the great achievements of our friends who are mentally ill or are wrong about some stuff or who are just weird.
I read his autobiography like a bajillion years ago. He was a brilliant scientist, but yeah, he had some serious mental health issues and was basically a garbage person in a lot of ways so I don’t blame the science community for ghosting him.
The essential lesson here is that people can be brilliant at some facets of math/science and still be dipshit morons with poor critical thinking skill in other fields. Kind of like how Shockley was the inventor of the transistor and was also a racist asshole who believed in eugenics.
Also, techno music sucks ass and it’s not even good at all.
The scientific community is full of assholes. Even my great hero, Feynman, if he hadn’t won the Nobel, would have been just another asshole. Mullis I don’t actually know much about, though I did read his autobiography. I don’t know how much of it he said just to shock people. He seemed to enjoy doing that. That’s a great story about how he wrote his dissertation. I think it was like 15 pages long. Compare that to the endless drivel most people produce. His insights into Bill and Hillary Clinton were interesting.
There are people who seem genuinely nice at that level in science but it often seems like a counterproductive trait in that environment. Freeman Dyson, though he’s not a Nobel Laureate, is one. Another, name escapes me bc this is my 3rd beer and I haven’t drunk much in years, won 2 Nobels.