Dancing Naked in the Mind Field (12 page)

When I started experimenting with PCR, I never knew how many molecules of enzyme I had in my solution. Enzyme amounts are expressed in units of activity, how many molecules of something it will turn into something else, under a standard set of conditions per unit of time. Only after I converted each of the ingredients needed to do PCR to a simple
system of counting molecules did the problem, and the solution, become obvious. Keep the number of things the enzyme is going to interact with smaller than the number of molecules of the enzyme. Simplicity is embarrassing when you have to work for months to achieve it.

W
HEN WE WERE
children, we thought our parents were taking care of things. Sometimes they were. As adults, we like to think that there are some very wise people, usually older than we are, taking care of the planet and us. As a result of this wishful thinking, a lot of people make a living under the pretense of doing just that.

It would be naïve to think that individuals working in government agencies charged with taking care of us, or even in nonprofit foundations with lofty names, are altruistic toward us. They aren’t sharing our genes. They aren’t our parents. They are attending to their own biological imperatives and their own personal needs. Only when “ours” and “theirs” overlap do we get attention.

Once in a while—wartime, for example—we all pull together. The general and the troops all have an equal and obvious stake in avoiding annihilation by the enemy. In peacetime it doesn’t happen often that strong pressures for individual biological success—life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness—overlap with pressures for survival of the group.

No one is looking out for our best interests. Not the church, not the president, not even Mother Teresa—Christianity,
Green Peace, and all the other Green Things notwithstanding. We’re on our own as always.

This is not new with the twentieth century. The constitutional government of the United States of America was set up with the notion of having checks and balances in government. The framers of that document were practical and aware that we cannot count on having philosopher kings or presidents who always act in the best interests of the country. We need two or more governments working in parallel, competing for control within a civil system to prevent a government from getting out of control and having to be displaced in an armed insurrection. It’s the best we can do under the circumstances, and it has worked pretty well. But there are new problems.

What has happened in this century is that the world has become increasingly complex. Many functions of government have spread into highly technical areas that are impossible for concerned outsiders to monitor continually.

The National Institutes of Health is one such monster. The Environmental Protection Agency is another. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration hires people who advance their careers by telling us about the hypothetical effects of sulfate aerosols, as though there were a real, scientifically sound connection between sulfate measurements and the weather in the next millennium. The Patent Office is another bureaucratic mess. The Federal Reserve Board is a tawdry sepsis. No one who works there has to worry too much about interest rates.

How can we bring the spirit of checks and balances into the massive arms of an enormous bunch of faceless bastards working, or sometimes just enriching themselves, doing God knows how many technical tasks?

When Congress passes a law that is not in keeping with the contemporary interpretation of the Constitution, the Supreme Court usually understands what is up and overrules it.

When the National Institutes of Health makes an announcement through one of its many spokespeople, who checks out the credibility of that statement?

Checks and balances are hard to come by in a scientific establishment that is supported from outside by a populace unskilled in the scientific arts. I know it’s going to be a hard and inefficient answer. Compared to a benevolent monarchy, having three branches of government was also inefficient. And I know that as long as it achieves a better life for us here in the colonies, we will put up with it. We are optimistic people really, and we are not in a hurry to go anywhere else. I don’t know exactly what the answer is, but I know that the answer is not to believe, “Trust us. We’re here to help.” It never has been.

In my naïveté, the world was a safe place until 1968. I thought it was watched over by an elite group of people with great wisdom who had proven themselves and were entrusted with protecting us and the planet. I hoped that I, a conscientious twenty-two-year-old who loved to learn and teach, would someday be a member of that group.

In the early weeks of 1968 I submitted an article I had written to the foremost scientific journal in the world,
Nature
, published in London. I called it “The Cosmological Significance of Time Reversal” and congratulated myself on its cleverness. It was a description—from my own experience and imagination—of the entire universe from the beginning to the end.

It was one of those intuitive things that needed to be expressed as a tentative hypothesis, on account of my limitation
experientially to the
right now
and my somewhat limited experience as a cosmologist. I was a second-year graduate student in biochemistry at Berkeley. I had read a lot about astrophysics and had taken some psychoactive drugs, which enhanced my perceived understanding of the cosmos. Not very good reasons to think that an international journal of science would want to publish my views for the edification of their very knowledgeable readership.

It was accepted. I received a flurry of letters from all over the world requesting reprints. At first I was elated by the response. Nature Times News Service circulated an article beginning, “It sounds like the wildest science fiction. But an American scientist seriously suggests that half the matter in the universe is going backwards in time.” Some lady in Melbourne sent it to me with a letter asking for my autograph. Later in the article they referred to me as “Dr. Kary Mullis of California University.” I began to be a little concerned. Something was definitely amiss in the world of science.

I was not a doctor. I was still a student, only hoping to become a doctor. Who had promoted me to doctor? Why would the news services pick up the story and print it all over the world in the papers? I was not really an experienced astrophysicist. What did I know about the universe?

I grew up. I lost that long-abiding feeling that there were older, wiser people minding the store. If there had been, they would not have allowed my first sophomoric paper on the structure of the universe to be published in the foremost scientific journal in the world.

Years later I invented the polymerase chain reaction. I was a professional scientist, and I knew what I had discovered. It
was not the speculations of a kid about the universe and time reversal. It was a chemical procedure that would make the structures of the molecules of our genes as easy to see as billboards in the desert and as easy to manipulate as Tinkertoys.

PCR would not require expensive equipment, and it would find tiny fragments of DNA and multiply them billions of times. And it would do it quickly.

The procedure would be valuable in diagnosing genetic diseases by looking into a person’s genes. It would find infectious diseases by detecting the genes of pathogens that were difficult or impossible to culture. PCR would solve murders from DNA samples in trace materials—semen, blood, hair. The field of molecular paleobiology would blossom because of PCR. Its practitioners would inquire into the specifics of evolution from the DNA in ancient specimens. The branchings and migrations of early man would be revealed from fossil DNA and its descendant DNA in modern humans. And when DNA was finally found on other planets, it would be PCR that would tell us whether we had been there before or whether life on other planets was unrelated to us and had its own separate roots.

I knew that PCR would spread across the world like wildfire. This time there was no doubt in my mind:
Nature
would publish it.

They rejected it. So did
Science
, the second most prestigious journal in the world.
Science
offered that perhaps my paper could be published in some secondary journal, as they felt it would not be suitable to the needs of their readers. “Fuck them,” I said.

It was some time before my disgust with the journals mellowed.
I accepted an offer by Ray Wu to publish it in
Methods in Enzymology
, a volume he was preparing. He understood the power of PCR.

This experience taught me a thing or two, and I grew up some more.

No wise men sit up there, watching the world from the vantage point of their last twenty years of life, making sure that the wisdom they have accumulated is being used.

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.

J
AMES BUCHANAN ADVANCED
an ugly idea that got him a Nobel Prize in 1986. Buchanan cannot be held responsible for the ugliness; we can’t blame the messenger. It came to be known as public choice theory. You will recognize it and wonder why people get Nobel Prizes for pointing out such simple things. The answer is that most people can’t see the simple things and the simple things are always the most important.

Buchanan divided the world into four groups—voters, politicians, bureaucrats, and interest groups. Everyone in each of these groups wants something from the System, and everyone but the voters are organized professionals. The voters have to go to work every day. They cannot concentrate from nine to five on how to get something from the System. Most of us fall into the voter category.

The chairman of the Federal Atmospheric Commission is having dinner tonight with his secretary and some expert they flew in from Cal Tech. He just announced tonight on CNN that his lab needed another $50 million dollars to study ozone depletion. Over swordfish, with the new science correspondent from CNN, they are congratulating themselves on what a smooth job they did today on the news. Crème caramel and
B&Bs and cappuccinos later they promise to meet again in Oslo at the Envirocon World 2000 meeting next fall.

The ozone story is on NPR as you drive home from work. You feel terrible about all those years that your shaving cream came from an aerosol can, and your wife was using aerosol hairspray. You seem to be feeling guilty a lot these days—almost every time you turn on the news and hear about the environment.

You stop by Walgreen’s to get some shaving gel without CFCs. The large pepperoni pizza in the back seat stinks up the car and it’s getting cold, but you’ve done your best for the planet. The family isn’t impressed when you get home. Maybe you think it would be nice to have some B&B of your own tonight, but it’s April. Taxes are due, and your wife, watching
Seinfeld
, doesn’t want to talk about it and wouldn’t think it was safe for you to go down to the liquor store this time of night anyhow. Your daughter reminds you that you haven’t sent the check to Greenpeace, and by the way, she’s definitely going up the coast this weekend to the protest over the Marin Headlands Interior Department deal, and your wife says she can’t, and “Would you please talk to her, Dad. She acts like I’m going up there for fun.”

Is this you? Or were you the one with the mushrooms and red peppers?

Who are these people who make comfortable salaries arranging scientific symposia and stories for the media? They aren’t politicians. Politicians don’t know anything about scientific things. They just want to look like they do. Somebody has to advise them. Who are those advisors? It’s an important question because those people—who are always having to
come up with the imminent disasters that can be prevented by governmental projects, sponsored by informed and well-meaning politicians—are manipulating you. They are parasites with degrees in economics or sociology who couldn’t get a good job in the legitimate advertising industry. They are responsible for a lot of the things that you accept year after year as your problems. The problems they imagine for you are as imaginary as the commercials during
Seinfeld
about some Australian outback macho guy, with a Hollywood model by his side, driving a four-wheel-drive vehicle, with pathetic halfwits in pursuit due to a misunderstanding about the relative merits of the vehicles.

Who pays these experts? Is it the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that the United Nations is supporting with our money? Or is it the Environmental Protection Agency, which you were bitching about today because your company was having to close down one of its plants due to some fish that might go extinct, and you might get transferred in the shuffle? Is it the Tropical Oceans and Global Atmosphere Group? Is it the Arctic Climate System Study? Is it the Marlowe Walker Eternity Endowment? Is it the World Ocean Circulation Experiment? Is it the World Bank’s Global Environment Facility? Is it Greenpeace? The Sierra Club? You are too tired from your day at work to try to figure it out. That’s what James Buchanan predicted. But the sun never sets on the British Empire or bureaucrats—environmentalists, as many of them are called today. Sleep soundly. Your planet is in well-fed hands.

Now, I like to hear a good story. I like to tell one. But when my car isn’t working, I want to know why—in terms that I can understand. I don’t want to fix it myself, but I’m more comfortable
if I understand what the problem is. I don’t like it when some mechanic, looking at my clean fingernails, thinks he can entertain me for a minute with conversation about the modern features of my car and then sock it to me. I feel the same way about our planet and my food.