Kary Mullis and PCR | A Prequel to the Misapplication of Meaning
In order to understand what has transpired over the last 4 years, one must first understand that Mullis was a chemical engineer engaged in experimental science.
Kary Mullis is my favorite engineer. He is also my favorite scientist and truth be told, my favorite poet. The first time I heard him speak, I fell in love with him. Not because he could paint a dazzling picture with his words, which he most certainly could, but because he used words exactly as they should be used. I’ve never heard anyone else speak quite as exactly as he did.
To justify that belief, here are a few of my favorite quotes from him.
On Communication and Information-
“We have to make it on the basis of our own wit. We have to be aware—when someone comes on the seven o’clock news with word that the global temperature is going up or that the oceans are turning into cesspools or that half the matter is going backward—that the media are at the mercy of the scientists who have the ability to summon them and that the scientists who have such ability are not often minding the store. More likely they are minding their own livelihoods.”
I use that statement to justify my belief that power corrupts and once a person has been given power, they can no longer be given the benefit of the doubt. It also clarifies that it is up to each and every one of us to maintain a constant attitude of skepticism and doubt about everything we hear, because the ability to be heard is in itself a form of power that grows with each additional person one can reach.
On Physics and Perception-
“We also have taste, touch, and smell. From birth, we also have the ability to detect “weightless.” We don’t like “weightless.” Unless we are in orbit, it means we are falling and going to land soon, maybe hard. If we are in orbit we are still falling, but we are moving so fast that by the time we fall to the level of the earth, the earth is behind us and we miss it and just keep on falling. We go around and around like the moon, which is also falling and sliding past at the same time. Our sense of “weightlessness” is not one of our more pleasant ones. It doesn’t have a lot of comforting familiarity of detail about it. Either you are or you aren’t falling, so it’s not much of a sensory mode by itself. It does, however, accentuate one more frequently acknowledged sensory mode.”
Douglas Adams made a strikingly similar point when he said that all one has to do to fly is throw themselves at the ground and miss. They are both discussing the same principle, which is also in effect and can easily be seen in the trajectory of a bullet. Whether you fire the bullet straight forward or drop it straight to the ground, it will hit the ground at the same time. The forward momentum only allows for travel in the one dimension, forward. The downward path remains the same. The bullet would have to travel at escape velocity, roughly 21,000 mph, in order to miss the ground.
On Mental Health Professionals-
“present-day mental health practitioners have their heads firmly inserted in their asses and generally need more help than they provide.”
“psychology is practiced by a bunch of well-paid incompetents.”
I completely agree, but I choose to word it thusly- Psychology and psychiatry are sciencey sounding pursuits for people who suck at math and science.
I absolutely love the way he spoke. I believe my attraction is based in the fact that he was first and foremost an engineer. He thought like an engineer and he spoke like one. I am also an engineer. What is an engineer? An engineer is someone who builds things. Anytime you hear someone discussing the things that Kary Mullis built, make sure to ask them what they build. If they don’t build anything, then they don’t understand what they are talking about. It really is that simple.
Someone who has never painted a picture, can not explain how Van Gogh did what he did. They can only explain their impression of what he did and that impression will be made up of and inherently flawed by their bias, beliefs, and ignorance and to quote Mullis once more-
“wherever there is ignorance, you can always find arrogance.”
Nowadays we call this the Dunning-Krueger effect which is defined as a cognitive bias in which people with limited competence in a particular domain overestimate their abilities.
Hopefully that is enough backstory for you to understand the rest of this post. If not, please feel free to ask questions in the comments below. I would much rather be forced to spend the next few weeks answering questions than let anyone walk away from this article with the wrong idea of what I am trying to tell you. Also, since this is a prequel to an upcoming post, it is really important that I properly convey the prerequisite info everyone will need to know prior to reading The Misapplication of Meaning.
The Meat of this Article
Kary Mullis is best known for his invention of PCR, a process which is used nowadays to justify all manner of medical quackery and totalitarian overreach.
The Nobel organization who awarded him with their much coveted prize define PCR as, “The process known as polymerase chain reaction (PCR), in which a small amount of DNA can be copied in large quantities over a short period of time.”
Mullis defined it as, “PCR is just a process that’s used to make a whole lot of something out of something.”
Anyone who is not an engineer may mistake that statement for an oversimplification. Hell, even a good number of engineers will make the same mistake, but you see, it is not an oversimplification. It is exactly what PCR is because it is a functional description of what PCR does. Form follows function and the description of a process must do the same. A process is defined by its dynamic, not by its color, shape, or other topical characteristic.
What does it mean to make a whole lot of something out of something? The technical term is amplification. One makes a whole lot of electricity out of electricity and a whole lot of sound out of sound by amplifying it and that is what PCR does. It amplifies whatever protein or amino acid based microscopic or smaller particle you want to amplify. It makes a whole lot of it.
Science writers and communicators, another two pursuits taken up almost exclusively by people who suck at math and science, like to claim that PCR is effective for diagnostics and forensics, but that is a mistake. PCR is effective at amplification and if you can find a diagnostic or forensic use for amplification, then I suppose you may find it useful, but I believe you will run into a huge issue of non-specificity when trying to use amplification for those type of activities,. Especially in the fields of virology and microbiology.
Why those, specifically? Because, and please allow me to say this bluntly, we are all made up of star dust. At the atomic and sub atomic levels, everything in this universe is made up of the same elemental particles. As you get down close to that level of scale, the tiniest molecules of everything become very non specific to the thing being examined and more homogenous to the content of this universe, itself.
That’s why. Or if you need further clarification from the source itself, in regards to using PCR as a diagnostic test, Kary Mullis explained the principle thusly, “If they could find this virus in you at all, and with the PCR, if you do it well, you can find almost anything in anybody. It starts to get you to believe in some kind of Buddhist notion, where everything is contained there and everything in between.”
This quote of his has been “widely and scientifically debunked” by nearly the entire occupational industry known as fact checkers, which is unfortunately made up entirely of people who in fact suck at just about everything and were forced to sell their souls in order to achieve gainful employment outside the field of golf ball collection at the many golf courses around the world. By amplifying their own Dunning-Kruger syndrome using their greed, ambition, and stunning lack of a moral compass, these unfortunates have risen to a level well beyond their natural trajectory, leaving so many golf balls simply laying upon the links, uncollected and un-re-used, and themselves so very vulnerable to the inevitable weightless plummet awaiting them as they fall to their proper station without the benefit of missing the ground.
That is my long winded way of saying what Kary Mullis once put so eloquently yet so succinctly,
“It is not allowable in science to make a statement of fact based solely on your own opinion.”
If only the fact checkers were capable of learning such a simple rule. Alas, they can not and will not. So, we must learn it for them. When a fact checkers claims anything to be debunked, yet links only other fact checkers who claim the same, and in turn cite other fact checkers, as their proof, nothing has been debunked but their own respectability. We must all help to get them back to where they belong, by any means necessary. Those balls won’t collect themselves.
Final Thoughts on My Hero
My favorite trait that Kary Mullis possessed was his ability to piss off both sides of our societal Hegelian Dialectic. Not only is he hated by the many mindless fact checkers and their money purse clutching patrons, but he is also hated by the outspoken hardcore deniers of everything found in the published literature of today. You know, the “ If it has ever been defined scientifically, it’s bullshit!” crowd who seem to have forgotten that the most effective lies always start with a grain of truth.
I have explained why the fact checkers hate him, total mind-numbing ignorance and pettiness, but why do the freedom loving haters hate him? Well, they believe he created PCR to vex them with his demonic ways and means and that he did it hand in hand with the money purse clutching patrons of those Dunning-Krugered journalists (Word used real loosely!).
Are they correct? Well, he was paid for his work, but not so much for PCR, which was of almost no financial benefit to him at the time. Also, he did not create it for the benefit of his employers, either.
At least, that is my opinion, as I fan-girl out completely on him. You see, I believe he created PCR because he was taking large amounts of LSD, weekly on Fridays during his 2.5 hour drives to his surf cabin, while also trying to think of a way to justify the continued employment his rather large staff at the time. I may be wrong, but I’ll let you figure that out and leave you with his explanation-
“Well, it was, you know, it was typical of a really interesting development in that I was looking for something else, and PCR was the possible outcome of a solution to a hypothetical problem that didn’t really exist. I mean, I was working on trying to sequence the single base pair, you know, I think they’re called SNPs today, single nucleotide polymorphisms, because those were medically important and I was trying to do it with all nuclear tides because I ran a lab that made them and we had really improved the efficiency with which we made them over the three or four years prior, so that we could make them a lot faster than the company, Cetus, that I worked for could use them.
I had seven people working for me and I was thinking, well I’m either going to have to cut the staff down to like about three, because now we’ve got these little automated devices that will do that, or I’m going to have to increase the demand for oligonucleotides and so I started thinking of what else can you do with them. And I thought it’s possible that you can make a rapid clinical essay for single base polymorphisms like sickle cell anaemia was a good example. That took, back then, maybe going to a clinic and take a sample and maybe three weeks later you’d know, which is a lot of agonising, kind of, and I thought, you know, it would be nice to have that in one shift in a hospital, kind of go in and they’d let you know, and I thought oligonucleotides maybe were the answer there, but I was a chemist, I still am a chemist, and I really didn’t have an appreciation for the hugeness of the human genome compared to, say, a 5,000 based plasma that I was using as a sort of a model system. And I was thinking of this method that would require a couple of oligonucleotides and one of them would sort of be a control, but they would be pointed, like, toward each other just like in a PCR reaction and I was thinking of how am I going to get rid of the excess of the axinucleotide triphosphates or something.
There was a couple of technical problems I was trying to solve and one of them, the way I decided to solve it, was to like run a sort of sham reaction first with the oligonucleotides in place and the sample and then I add my radioactive traces and stuff and run it again and this was going to use up the … it was just not for the idea at first, duplicating the signal, but then I realised the side effect of that was going to be that I was going to double the signal if there were enough, like, the axinucleotides available. I was trying to get rid of those if there were any coming in with the sample.”
-Kary Mullis - December 28, 1944 - August 7, 2019