Kary Mullis On His Favorite Science Books in Discover Magazine

25 Greatest Science Books: Introduction

Nobel laureate Kary B. Mullis ponders on the firmament of science books

By Kary B. Mullis

November 17, 2006

When molecular biologist Max Delbrück received the Nobel Prize in 1969, he rejoiced but also had a lament. Samuel Beckett's contributions to literature, which were honored at the same time, seemed to Max universally accessible, unlike his own. In his Nobel lecture, he imagined his imprisonment in an ivory tower of science. "The books of the great scientists," he said, "are gathering dust on the shelves of learned libraries. And rightly so. The scientist addresses an infinitesimal audience of fellow composers."

Unlike Max, I am not convinced that the joy of scientific creation must remain mysterious, locked away from all but a few informed colleagues. I lean toward my other historical hero, physicist and prankster Richard Feynman, in this matter. I think Feynman would have said, "If you can understand it, you can explain it." I'm grateful that an ever-increasing number of scientists now do.

That said, most of my favorite books are by physicists trying to make some communicable sense out of a quantum reality that cannot really be understood. There comes a time, in reading this type of book, when I think I'm about to get it, and then I realize I don't understand it at all. Maybe I like the befuddled feeling and the assurance from the authors that nobody else really understands it either.

In The End of Time, for instance, Julian Barbour argues that time as we know it does not exist. It is a faulty perception, similar to our perception that the world is flat. In a twist on the Copernican revolution, Barbour portrays a silent world devoid of action, where nothing, neither heavens nor Earth, moves. David Bohm, in a classic called Wholeness and the Implicate Order, suggests rather convincingly that the structure of our language is what prevents us from being aware that nothing actually happens here. Bohm's philosophy was way out there (he had a cult of devotees when he died), and you should come away from this book doubting your sanity.

Robert Nadeau and Menas Kafatos's book, The Non-Local Universe, skillfully lures you to confront the same kind of madness, if you don't instead pitch it into the nearest body of deep water. To appreciate this book, you must accept the disturbing fact that things can be immediately and intimately connected to each other even if they are light-years apart. In other words, there is nothing that corresponds to our classical concept of geometric distance, and every particle in existence since the so-called (and probably not singular) Big Bang is, in a way, the same stinking particle.

Dean Radin's book, Entangled Minds, extends this diabolical puzzle to extrasensory perception. ESP usually implies people sensing what has happened to a loved one thousands of miles away, but Radin describes something different: mind influencing matter. For the Global Consciousness Project, scientists set up 36 computer programs running separately, in different labs scattered around the earth, whose job is to generate random numbers. They do this by timing the decay of radioactive nuclei, which any physicist will agree occurs at random. Yet the results seem to be inexplicably affected by worldwide psychological reactions, like the ones sparked by the horrible events of 9/11. That is, they become less random—an effect analogous to a coin toss turning up heads many, many times in a row. Radin describes this as an unavoidable consequence of the interconnected, entangled physical reality we live in. I know Radin, and I know he's not intentionally fooling himself or anybody else.

Books like Radin's doggedly pursue scientific evidence for ideas that have been widely, but unreasonably, discredited for decades, or even centuries. Fortunately, scientists (at least in the Western world) no longer get confined to quarters or excommunicated for their books. But when an author puts himself on the line by embracing an unfashionable idea, even though he is guaranteed to generate scorn or indifference, this should somehow be recognized.

Moving toward biology, Richard Dawkins's book The Selfish Gene made a lot of people uncomfortable by suggesting that our genes are not really ours and that they have no serious interest in us except as convenient vessels in which they can copy themselves. Minor errors in the copying process are what give natural selection room to operate. The novelty here is that the genes do the evolving, not us. This was a little difficult for people with a humanistic bent to swallow, but most of them have washed it down with a great many bottles of Scotch by now, and the arguments have faded.

I also recommend Daniel Dennett's Consciousness Explained and Darwin's Dangerous Idea, which may be the finest examples of the philosophical literature of our times. I recently watched an old Monty Python skit that portrayed a soccer match between philosophers from Greece and Germany. Archimedes, Heidegger, Kant, Socrates, Nietzsche—all contemplate the ball thoughtfully, murmuring, but nobody kicks it. Finally Archimedes, with a flash of insight (Eureka!), kicks the ball, and the Greeks win. Daniel Dennett, in his recent book Breaking the Spell, kicks the ball. He wants to know why we do not have the privilege to question other people's personal religious convictions. He doesn't say it with venom, and he is careful to avoid stating directly that, after much sincere questioning, many of us find certain religious beliefs socially destructive and morally repugnant.

I'd like to conclude with one of my favorite books, Oncogenes, Aneuploidy, and AIDS, by Harvey Bialy, about the career of scientist Peter Duesberg. Though centered on one man, it speaks to issues of power in the scientific establishment that will outlive Bialy and his hero. Duesberg recanted his own much-celebrated theory of how cancers form—a theory that earned him the California Scientist of the Year Award—when he eventually saw the arithmetic illogic in it. Scientists don't generally do this. I can't think of a single one, including Einstein, who, when confronted with all the reasons in the world to back off from a bad position, ever did, except for Duesberg. As Bialy describes it, everybody cared about cancer, but the only man who understood that it was not caused by oncogenes was scorned by his peers for changing his mind. Bialy fills his book with direct quotes, allowing a number of the unsavory characters in this story to hoist themselves by their own inelegant petards. In the courage of both scientist and author, I see greatness.

---

Nobel laureate Kary B. Mullis invented the polymerase chain reaction (PCR)

Note: Dr. Mullis' interest in quantum physics is a longstanding one as regular readers of YBYL may know. Newcomers can read his contribution to Nature on the subject, while still in graduate school, here. [Otis]

Comments

[Mouth of the Yellow River]

Ni Hao! Kannichi Wa!

There is an intimate relationship in the first and last of Mullis’ favorites unified by recent developments in Human Cancer Genome Sequencing. Lewis Carroll had Barbour (“time as we know it does not exist. It is a faulty perception, similar to our perception that the world is flat”) preempted by many years in Through the Looking Glass.

The Alice’s have begun their futile run with the Queen (see here) in further sequencing “human cancer genomes” to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars distributed among the Baylor College of Medicine, The Broad Institute (a Harvard and MIT joint venture) and the Washington University Genome Sequencing Center. And these are “pilot projects” mind you.

The meek understatement of an oncologist in the Texas Medical Center in Houston where Baylor resides was quoted in the Houston Chronicle: "There is some controversy that big science is winning out over small science." But he chimes “concentrating the sequencing efforts in the hands of a few established centers, has one major benefit that small-scale science doesn't. It should continue to drive down the price of sequencing.”

Great Buddha, this is what the scientific method has been reduced to—mindless data generation with no rationale other than doing it will make doing more of it cheaper.

And at the expense of those who would like to probe alternatives to the collective point mutation theory of cancer progression.

MOTYR

The most curious part of the thing was, that the trees and the other things round them never changed their places at all: however fast they went, they never seemed to pass anything. “I wonder if all the things move along with us?” thought poor puzzled Alice. And the Queen seemed to guess her thoughts, for she cried, “Faster! Don't try to talk!”

[George]

Perhaps the laureat's over the top praise for Bialy's admittedly fine book is somehow connected to this odd story .

[Alban T.]

I am an immigrant to the United States from post WWII Europe, and have witnessed a good proportion of the last century, which I am fond of characterizing as an epoch in which the singular achievment was the ability to make big out of little in practically every conceivable manner.

Having just read Dr. Bialy's review of the PCR book, I now discover that this insight also applies to Dr. Mullis' otherwise totally splendid idea.

Bialy calls PCR, "the ability to make more and more out of less and less, the ultimate decontextualization of genetic information."