Kary Mullis - Personal Views

Personal Views

Mullis has said that the never-ending quest for more grants and staying with established dogmas has hurt science. He believes that "Science is being practiced by people who are dependent on being paid for what they are going to find out," not for what they actually produce. Mullis has been described as an "impatient and impulsive researcher" who avoids lab work and instead thinks about research topics while driving and surfing.

In his 1998 autobiography, Mullis expressed disagreement with the scientific evidence supporting climate change and ozone depletion, the evidence that HIV causes AIDS, and asserted his belief in astrology. Mullis claims climate change and the HIV/AIDS connection are due to a conspiracy of environmentalists, government agencies and scientists attempting to preserve their careers and earn money, rather than scientific evidence. Mullis has drawn controversy for his association with prominent AIDS denialist Peter Duesberg, claiming that AIDS is an arbitrary diagnosis only used when HIV antibodies are found in a patient's blood. The medical and scientific consensus is that Duesberg's hypothesis is pseudoscience, HIV having been conclusively proven to be the cause of AIDS and that global warming is occurring because of human activities. Seth Kalichman, AIDS researcher and author of Denying AIDS, " that it seems odd to include a Nobel Laureate among the who's who of AIDS pseudoscientists". Mullis also wrote the foreword to the book What If Everything You Thought You Knew About AIDS Was Wrong? by Christine Maggiore, an HIV-positive AIDS denialist who, along with her daughter, died of an AIDS-related illness. A New York Times article listed Mullis as one of several scientists who, after success in their area of research, go on to make unfounded, sometimes bizarre statements in other areas. An article in the Skeptical Inquirer described Mullis as an "...AIDS denialist with scientific credentials has never done any scientific research on HIV or AIDS".