Kary Mullis Biography

Kary Banks Mullis was born in Lenoir, North Carolina, in 1944, the son of Cecil Banks Mullis and Bernice Alberta (Barker) Fredericks. 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. He was awarded his Ph.D. in 1973, and he accepted a teaching position at the University of Kansas Medical School in Kansas City, where he stayed for four years. In 1977, he assumed a...
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