Kary Mullis

About Kary

• When he was a boy, he experimented with rocket fuel, sent a frog "into space."
• Says he's still that little kid, with a passion for chemistry and inventing.
• Went to UC Berkeley for his undergraduate through doctoral studies, then worked in a peptide chemistry lab in San Francisco.
• Heard a lecturer say that they'd "fooled" a bacteria into making peptides; realized if bacteria could do it, he didn't want to learn how to make peptides.
• Turned his vision towards artificially constructing strands of DNA.
• Invented the Polymerase Chain Reaction, which allowed a small strand of DNA to be copied over and over.
• Was awarded the Nobel Prize in chemistry for that process.
• After his Nobel Prize, it took him a while to figure out what to work on next-taught him there are many paths to go down, you shouldn't limit yourself to just one.