Dancing Naked in the Mind Field Quotes

“The biggest battle I fought with the danger officer was over the fact that I insisted on keeping my lunch and a case of Beck’s beer in the same fridge in which I kept my radioactive isotopes.”
― Kary Mullis, Dancing Naked in the Mind Field

“It only needs to be convincing to the misinformed voter. Some of the big truths voters have accepted have little or no scientific basis. And these include the belief that AIDS is caused by human immunodeficiency virus, the belief that fossil fuel emissions are causing global warming, and the belief that the release of chlorofluorocarbons into the atmosphere has created a hole in the ozone layer. The illusions go even deeper into our everyday lives when they follow us to the grocery store.”
― Kary Mullis, Dancing Naked in the Mind Field

“Any time a magnet wiggles, no matter how small it is, or how fast or slow it wiggles, it makes some kind of light. Most light is made by little magnets called molecules, and our eyes are tuned to a very narrow range of it.”
― Kary Mullis, Dancing Naked in the Mind Field

“wherever there is ignorance, you can always find arrogance.”
― Kary Mullis, Dancing Naked in the Mind Field

“present-day mental health practitioners have their heads firmly inserted in their asses and generally need more help than they provide.”
― Kary Mullis, Dancing Naked in the Mind Field

“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.”
― Kary Mullis, Dancing Naked in the Mind Field

“You can’t talk to a jury about the technical details of your specialty and make any sense. The jury won’t know what you’re talking about, and that is precisely why you were hired.”
― Kary Mullis, Dancing Naked in the Mind Field

“When the National Institutes of Health makes an announcement through one of its many spokespeople, who”
― Kary Mullis, Dancing Naked in the Mind Field

“When the National Institutes of Health makes an announcement through one of its many spokespeople, who checks out the credibility of that statement?”
― Kary Mullis, Dancing Naked in the Mind Field

“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.”
― Kary Mullis, Dancing Naked in the Mind Field

“If there is something in my food that somebody says is a poison, I want to have the chemistry explained and decide for myself whether or not I want to eat it.”
― Kary Mullis, Dancing Naked in the Mind Field

“It is not allowable in science to make a statement of fact based solely on your own opinion.”
― Kary Mullis, Dancing Naked in the Mind Field

“I couldn’t help but notice the amazing coincidence that the American patent on the production of freon, the principle chlorofluorocarbon used in refrigerators and air conditioners, expired at just about the same time freon was banned.”
― Kary Mullis, Dancing Naked in the Mind Field

“We accept the proclamations of scientists in their lab coats with the same faith once reserved for priests.”
― Kary Mullis, Dancing Naked in the Mind Field

“The appropriate demeanor for a human is to feel lucky that he is alive and to humble himself in the face of the immensity of things and have a beer. Relax. Welcome to Earth. It’s a little confusing at first. That’s why you have to come back over and over again before you learn to really enjoy yourself. The sky is not falling.”
― Kary Mullis, Dancing Naked in the Mind Field

“It was an accident. It had to do with random mutations in our DNA that, at the time, didn’t matter. We were already getting plenty of vitamin C coming up out of our liver. It came from our food and was not broken down in our stomach, intestines, or liver. It emerged into the bloodstream intact, readily available to all of our cells. We lost the ability to make it ourselves, without becoming extinct, because we didn’t need to make it. And more than that, we reproduced faster than our associates who had not lost the ability to make it.”
― Kary Mullis, Dancing Naked in the Mind Field

“psychology is practiced by a bunch of well-paid incompetents.”
― Kary Mullis, Dancing Naked in the Mind Field