Kary Mullis

“There's no reason to be scared of things you can't see.”

“There is no evidence that HIV causes AIDS.”

“What you're taught in school is not an education but an indoctrination.”

“I have a Ph.D. in biochemistry, which is a lot like a license to kill. It's a license to do things that other people are not supposed to do.”

“Astrology is a lot more fun than astronomy. It's got people in it.”

“It's not that I'm smarter than anyone, it's that I'm stupider than most people... I'm willing to ask questions that other people would be embarrassed to ask.”

“PCR is more a concept than a technology. It's a way of thinking about things.”

“The first step in any scientific investigation is to see what everyone else has said about it.”

“Scientists are not the paragons of rationality, objectivity, and dispassionate inquiry that they are often made out to be.”

“The process of discovery is not a straight line. It's a very messy business.”

“If you have a new idea, you're a crank until you're a genius.”

“I take a lot of LSD. I find it to be a very interesting drug.”

“For me, the spirit of inquiry, the spirit of the scientist, is a thing that is not separable from the man.”

“The world is a very complicated place, and the only way to deal with it is to have a lot of different kinds of people thinking about it from a lot of different points of view.”

“I think science is a way of getting at the truth. It's not the only way, but it's a good way.”

“It's a mistake to think that the people who are running things know what they're doing.”