ABOVE: FLICKR, ERIK CHARLTON
Kary Mullis, whose invention of the polymerase chain reaction technique earned him the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1993, died of pneumonia on August 7, according to MyNewsLA.com. He was 74 years old.
According to a 1998 profile in The Washington Post, Mullis was known as a “weird” figure in science and “flamboyant” philanderer who evangelized the use of LSD, denied the evidence for both global warming and HIV as a cause of AIDS, consulted for O.J. Simpson’s legal defense, and formed a company that sold jewelry embedded with celebrities’ DNA. The opening paragraph of his Nobel autobiography includes a scene depicting a visit from Mullis’s dying grandfather in “non-substantial form.”
“He was personally and professionally one of the more iconic personalities science has ever witnessed,” Rich Robbins, the founder and CEO of Wareham Development, a real estate developer for a number of biotech companies, tells ...
