He grew up in Columbia, North Carolina, a small city in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains, where his temperament and his curiosity about the world set him apart from others. As a high school student, for example, Mullis designed a rocket that carried a frog some 7,000 feet in the air before splitting open and allowing the live cargo to parachute safely back to earth. Even at a young age, Mullis was considered a maverick and nonconformist. He entered Georgia Institute of Technology in 1962 and studied chemistry. As an undergraduate, he created a laboratory for manufacturing poisons and explosives. He also invented an electronic device stimulated by brain waves that could control a light switch.
Upon graduation from Georgia Tech in 1966 with a B.S. degree in chemistry, Mullis entered the doctoral program in biochemistry at the University of California, Berkeley. In Berkeley at that time there was growing interest in hallucinogenic drugs; Mullis taught a controversial neurochemistry class on the subject. His thesis adviser, Joe Nielands, told Omni that as a graduate student Mullis was "very undisciplined and unruly; a free spirit." Yet at the age of twenty-four, he wrote a paper on the structure of the universe that was published by Nature magazine.
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