Chemistry and the Mind Field

An Interview with Kary Mullis

Kary Mullis won the 1993 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his invention of the polymerase chain reaction (PCR), which revolutionized the study of genetics. The journal Science listed Dr. Mullis's invention of PCR as one of the most important scientific breakthroughs in human history. It has influenced popular culture, science fiction, and even paleobiology. Dr. Mullis earned his Ph.D. in biochemistry from the University of California at Berkeley. He is the author of numerous scientific papers as well as the book Dancing Naked in the Mind Field, in which he makes a compelling case for the existence of greater mystery in the world around us. He was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 1998 and is a Distinguished Professor at Children's Hospital Oakland Research Institute in Oakland, California.

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David: Where do you think humanity should be focusing its scientific efforts right now?

Kary: I think that if we, as a society, want to survive for a long time, then we've got to put up an umbrella over our heads to protect us from the things that are obviously going to fall on our planet.

I often wonder, given that the universe is so vast, with so many stars that must have planets like ours, why there aren't aliens down here trying to trade us beads and trinkets for Manhattan? (laughter) We must have something that they'd think was cool, and yet it just doesn't seem to be the case. If it is, they're not making themselves known.

Maybe it's because cultures tend to get wiped out by asteroids. We have gotten to the point where we can look into the near vicinity of space and see the things that are a serious danger to us. The asteroid belt is full of things that don't have stable orbits. Maybe by the time a culture can recognize that, it's too late, because they have gone off on some ridiculous tangents. I think we've done that, in terms of our science.

We're not pragmatists anymore. For at least a couple of hundred years Americans have always been thought of as pragmatic philosophers—if it doesn't matter, we're not going to worry about it too much. We've spent billions and billions trying to understand something called "the Grand Unified Theory of Everything"—and all you have to do is take LSD one time to realize that that is not going to happen. (laughter) You're just not going to find "the Grand Unified Field of Everything."

You can pretend to find it by spending vast sums of money and building huge machines. We're building this great big thing called BABAR, which looks like an elephant. It's an attachment that detects B-mesons, and will sit on top of the Stanford Linear Accelerator. They're making something that's going to produce a lot of what's called B-mesons, and, from its particular properties, physicists hope to understand enough to provide the final structure of the universe—"the Grand Unified Theory of Everything."

But human beings, who are paying for this whole endeavor, will never understand this. I've been studying it since I was a little boy, and it's not really clear to me that this particular theory of everything is anything more than just a myth. You can find evidence for anything if you look hard enough.

David: What do you think is the biggest threat to the human species?

Kary: We need to know where the asteroids are and which ones could be on a course for Earth sometime in the next five hundred years, or even right now. If something two miles wide crashed on this planet going 17 thousand miles per hour—which it probably would be by the time it got here—it would destroy everything. It's done it before. We know for sure it happened 65 million years ago. That seems like a long time, but it's not an infinitely long time. It's just a long time.

You have to have a sense of a long-distant future for man to be concerned about something like that. There are many asteroids, and every now and then, because of interactions among themselves, one of them will flip itself out of the band between Mars and Jupiter. It will generally head sunward—that means that it comes toward us. It only takes one, and in two minutes the whole planet will be uninhabitable. Maybe a few of us will survive. Perhaps a couple of people up in Denver will be able to hang on.

The last time it happened something five miles wide landed north off of present-day Yucatán. It left a hundred-mile-wide hole and kicked up a tidal wave that, when it passed where Kansas City is today, was five hundred feet high. Denver would have escaped the tidal wave, but the world was totally changed in a matter of minutes.

We can prevent this from happening if we put enough attention toward it and take our physicists off of things like quarks, which most of us are not too concerned about. We were worried that the Russians would get there first, and make a superbomb that we wouldn't be able to make. Now that's over, so let's put an umbrella of protection over our culture—so that we have a million years or so to ponder what our options are. Who are we? That sort of thing.

David: Do you think it's possible to blow up an asteroid that's headed toward us before it strikes the Earth?

Kary: I think so. The next time one of them is about to land here, whether we've prepared for it or not, we'll probably try to do that. There have been a couple of movies where people make an emergency attempt to, and there have been technical papers written about it; but we shouldn't wait until one is almost here. We need to be watching them. There are now about seventy-five catalogued Earth-orbit-crossing asteroids. Astronomers are watching their orbits, but every now and then a new one appears, or someone suddenly discovers a new comet. Comets...