Dancing Naked in the Mind Field by Kary Mullis Read Free Book Online

Overnight my lab had become a very dangerous place. I went storming into his office. “What do you think those hoods are made out of glass for?” I screamed at him. “With all your stickers covering the glass, you can’t see a damn thing!” When I calmed down, I explained, “My peopledon’t need to be constantly reminded they’re in danger. They’re not in that much danger or we wouldn’t be doing it. With all your little signs everywhere, nobody can tell what’s dangerous and what’s not, because according to you everything is dangerous.”
    With a razor blade and solvents, I scraped off all his danger stickers. Eventually we compromised. I allowed him to post those signs required by law but not on any transparent surfaces. And we agreed that every time he put up a new sign, he had to take down an old one.
    The biggest battle I fought with the danger officer was over the fact that I insisted on keeping my lunch and a case of Beck’s beer in the same fridge in which I kept my radioactive isotopes. I kept the beer in bottles on the bottom shelf and the radioactive isotopes in a sealed lead-lined container on the top shelf. I pointed out to him that there was no way known to science that anything, even radiation, could escape from a closed lead-lined container into a sealed bottle. “I’m planning on drinking most of that beer myself,” I said. “If it wasn’t safe, I wouldn’t put it in there.”
    Fortunately, Pete Farley, the president of Cetus, liked my beer. He liked coming into my lab in the afternoon and taking a bottle from my refrigerator. This presented the danger officer with a dangerous situation, so he took the safest way out: He stopped searching my refrigerator.
    Once he hired a beautiful young woman as his assistant. He sent her into my lab to conduct a safety inspection. I eventually called her
Nostradama Salutatis
or “Our Lady of Safety.” The danger officer thought she might be able to handle me. Instead, I invited her home for dinner, and several months later she moved in with me.
    As it turned out, the most dangerous thing in my lab was associated with Our Lady of Safety. One afternoon a man who thought he was her boyfriend kicked open my door and started threatening me. That was the only time in my life that I worried about my safety in a laboratory.

4
FEAR AND LAWYERS IN LOS ANGELES
    W INNING THE N OBEL Prize for PCR put me and my surfboard on the front page of nearly every newspaper in the world. By the time nightfall had swept once around the planet, a conservative estimate placed 328,716 small caged birds directly above my picture, flicking little greenish droplets rancid with uric acid.
    That number is based on a world population in 1993 of 5,506,000,000 and estimates by Mr. Jamie Yorck, a noted bird expert from San Francisco, that one sixty-seventh of all human beings own caged small birds; and all of them of necessity buy some newspaper, which they replace daily in the cage, unless they are pigs, again according to Mr. Yorck. The average size of that newspaper might be twenty-five pages on weekdays, and my image spanned about one-tenth of a page. Thus, 328,716 birds were directly above me. Add the further indignity of chicks, kitties, puppies, wrapped fish entrails, and the unknown dark fluids deep in tropical dumpsters. It gave me the creeps.
    Speaking of birds, I bet you didn’t know that birds and primates, but not kitties, puppies, or other mammals, secrete uric acid as the final metabolic product of DNA. Uric acid secretion is something primates have uniquely in common withbirds. Among the primates, humans are the only whistlers. Birds whistle. I think this suggests an avian connection, and isn’t it true that we have learned to fly? Maybe again. How come we’re not descended from the birds? Perhaps, if the hulking, upright, bipedal dodo had not been extinguished so quickly in the seventeenth century by the arrival on Mauritius of European fools with firearms, there may