Dancing Naked in the Mind Field (4 page)

My mother was thrilled to be in Sweden. I believe she had always expected that at least one of her sons would win a Nobel Prize, but she was most impressed with the fact that I was able to introduce her to CNN correspondent Lou Dobbs. She had had a crush on him for years, and for my mother, the most exciting part of the trip was getting to sit next to Lou Dobbs.

I gave my final lecture in the city of Malmö and boarded a hovercraft that was going to skim across the water to Copenhagen. By that time my picture had been in every paper every day for a week. As I sat down, a man wearing a big hat with a feather in it came over to me. “Dr. Mullis,” he said, “the people of Sweden love you.” And then in a great gesture, he took off his hat and bowed to me. The people on the boat applauded. It was a perfect ending.

E
VERY
N
OVEMBER WHEN
I was young, my mother would give my brothers and me a pile of catalogues and let us pick what we wanted for Christmas. It was in one of those catalogues that I found a Gilbert Chemistry Set. Something about tubes filled with things with exotic names intrigued me. My objective with that set was to figure out what things I might put together to cause an explosion. I discovered that whatever chemicals might be missing from the set could be bought at the local drugstore. In the 1950s in Columbia, South Carolina, it was considered okay for kids to play with weird things. We could go down to the hardware store and buy 100 feet of dynamite fuse, and the clerk would just smile and say, “What are you kids going to do? Blow up the bank?”

The first thing of any consequence that I made with my chemistry set was a substance similar to thermite. I mixed powdered aluminum, ammonium nitrate, a dash of something else, and heated it over an alcohol burner. When I pulled it away from the flames, the reaction kept going. The mixture got red hot, broke the test tube, and suddenly went
Fffffsshhoooo
. Now that, I thought—being only seven years old—was cool. I
didn’t know what had happened then, but I decided that science was going to be fun.

We were fortunate to have the Russians as our childhood enemies. We practiced hiding under our desks in case they had the temerity to drop a nuclear weapon on Columbia, South Carolina, during school hours. In 1957 the Russians launched the space race by putting Sputnik I into orbit around Earth. It was only twenty-three inches in diameter, but it revolutionized the American educational system. The government poured millions of dollars into science education. It was a fortuitous time to be young and in love with science.

Two years later, my friends and I were launching our own rockets in my backyard. Our goal was to see how high into the sky we could send a frog and bring it back alive, but we also wanted to create a huge blastoff and a long, colorful trail. To fuel our rocket, we began experimenting with different concentrations of potassium nitrate and sugar. I’d mix it in a tennis ball can and heat it on the charcoal grill. Every so often my mother would lean out the window and warn, “Now Kary B, don’t you blow your eyes out!”

I’d respond cheerfully, “Okay, Mom, I won’t.”

But kids being kids, and explosives being explosives, occasionally the fuel would explode. One time it set a big tree on fire. This taught me an important lesson: Never mix explosive chemicals under a big tree.

The first chemistry lab in which I spent some time was Dreher High. Our teacher would leave the lab open in the afternoons so Al Montgomery and I could play in there. She was pleased we wanted to be there. Most of her students hated chemistry. Everything we played with would today be considered
too dangerous for adults to use without federally approved supervision. But in 1960 chemicals were just bottles of stuff that no one took very seriously. It was perfectly acceptable to turn sixteen-year-old boys loose in a chemistry lab.

When I became president of the Junior Engineering Technical Society (JETS), Al and I thought it would be fun to put on a science show for the elementary schools in Columbia. The stated objective of the show was to demonstrate the basic principles of science as they had been explained by Isaac Newton in the seventeenth century.

The show consisted of a series of demonstrations. We rolled metal balls down inclined wooden troughs to illustrate how mass is accelerated in a gravitational field. We taught that a hypothesis is a guess that can be proven into a theory by doing experiments.

We had a dramatic opening. A concoction with iodine and potassium perchlorate. It began with burning some alcohol, quietly heating and concentrating the other ingredients in a porcelain dish behind a crack in the curtains. When the eerie blue alcohol flame died out, the residue would blaze up into serious pyrotechnic action for a second and then there would be sparks till it was over. It always worked before.

But when we did the show at A. C. Moore Elementary, my neighborhood grammar school, it didn’t. The blue flame wavered for a second, and then the whole thing exploded. Shards of the crucible blew all over the place. Everyone sat in complete awe of chemistry.

I held my breath waiting for someone from the bloodstained front row to be carried backstage in the arms of my first-grade teacher. No one appeared. I walked tentatively onto
the stage and started talking about Isaac Newton, checking out the front row for blood. I didn’t see any.

When we were through, a boy with blond hair and a little blood on him came backstage with a small piece of glass that had hit him in the forehead. He wasn’t bothered by it. It was as if he’d caught a baseball after a home run. I took the piece of glass from him and asked him not to tell. He was a kid from my neighborhood. I knew he’d keep quiet.

I first worked in a professional lab the summer after my high school graduation. My dad helped me get a job at Columbia Organic, a supplier of research chemicals. There was no excuse for such a company in a little town like Columbia, except for the person of Max Gergel. Max is an amazing entrepreneur, a courtly gentleman, and a wonderful storyteller. He wrote some of the stories down in
Excuse Me Sir, But Could I Interest You in a Kilo of Isopropyl Bromide?

Max owned and operated Columbia Organic. He made about a thousand research chemicals, but he resold a lot more. My job was to go through his orders in the morning and find the cheapest supplier of the chemicals we were ordering. The same chemicals can have several different names, depending on who is using them and for what. I would translate them into all their chemical names in different languages.

One day I discovered a bizarre oversight that had gone unnoticed for years. We were buying a chemical from Fluka, a Swiss company, for one of our customers in Illinois. We were paying Fluka $100 a gram. No one in the company had noticed that we had a kilogram of the very same chemical in stock but under another name. When we would place an order with Fluka, they would turn around and order the required amount
from us—at $24 a gram—and send it on to our customer. Fluka had to know what was going on but saw no reason to enlighten us at Columbia Organic.

I told Max about it. He thought it was hilarious. He called the guy from Fluka at home. They had a history together and this was just another funny story in a long line of funny stories. Max took me to lunch for the first time. I was no longer just his high school employee—I was his friend.

Sometimes we got orders for discontinued chemicals. Columbia Organic didn’t make them, and other suppliers no longer kept them in stock. The summer after my freshman year at Georgia Tech, Al and I decided to try to supply Max with the chemicals that no one else had. We set up a lab in Al’s garage. I made a deal with Max: we would use anything in his stockroom to make the chemicals and we would sell them to him for 60 percent of the standard price.

The thing we had failed to consider about these chemicals was that if they had been convenient to make, somebody else would have been doing it. Max probably knew that, but he wanted those compounds, and he saw in us something of himself many years earlier and he liked it. He wanted to see our business unfold.

We worked at night in Al’s garage. Our first synthesis was nitrosobenzene. Max had given us a little sample left in an empty bottle from an old shipment. The solid was brown and oily. Nitrosobenzene should be white and crystalline. We decided ours would set a new standard for the industry. At the library of the University of South Carolina we looked up the procedure in
Organic Synthesis
. It sounded easy. We bought a five-gallon crock and a thick glass rod at a hardware store.

Into the crock we measured nitrobenzene, water, and ice.
We stirred and slowly added zinc, which reduced the nitrobenzene to phenylhydroxylamine. We filtered it away from the solid zinc oxide that had also formed in the reaction and added more ice. Now we poured in a measured amount of chromic acid with vigorous stirring and animated conversation. As described in
Organic Synthesis
, the phenylhydroxylamine turned into nitrosobenzene, which floated to the top. We filtered it out. It was brown and oily, but we had about 100 grams. At $4 a gram, we were rich.

We could have dried it and taken it to Max, and he would have paid us and sold it for $6 a gram, but we were not going to make inferior chemicals just to get by. We spent the remainder of the night purifying our product. When we were done, our crystals were white, with a very slight greenish cast in the early morning sunlight. It was the prettiest nitrosobenzene the chemical business would ever see. We had lost about 20 percent, but what we had was pure. We had made our first real chemical.

The next day we took the nitrosobenzene to Max, and had he not done conscientious things like that as a kid in the business, he would have been shocked. He was pleased to the point of adopting us both as his children forever. Chemists get emotional about other chemists because of the language they have in common and the burns on their hands.

Al and I went out to the stockroom to find the ingredients we would need for our next synthesis. There is an immense thrill when you gather together the ingredients to make something new. We put the bottles in the blue ’55 Chevy. Gergel watched us leave, wishing he could cancel his day, and twenty years, and follow us home.

We were going to make some phenacyl bromide. No one
else in the world was willing to go to that trouble and deal with the hazards for the small market that existed.

Bromine is a dense red liquid. It fumes when you weigh it out, and it pours like mercury. If you get it on you, it leaves a deep scar. We poured it into the dropping funnel and very slowly let it drip into the stirred ether solution. It gets a little warm—if you drop it in too fast, the ether boils. Ice and patience help. We had plenty of ice.

The reaction gives off hydrogen bromide, a corrosive gas with a pungent odor. We were venting the gas through a wall fan into the humid southern night. Around one o’clock we took a beer break and discovered that the entire neighborhood was enveloped in a choking white cloud of hydrogen bromide. We figured the cloud would be dispersed by morning when the neighborhood awoke. Unfortunately, we had killed a large camellia bush that was growing under the fan.

We kept working. The phenacyl bromide crystallized and we started filtering it out of the ether. By that point it had begun to smell extremely pungent. I asked, “Al, what were you saying about the properties of this stuff?”

“Org Syn
said it was a lachrymator.”

“What’s that?”

“It’s like a tear gas.”

That didn’t make sense to me. “This is a solid, not a gas.”

“I know, that’s why I wasn’t worried.”

“My eyes are stinging, Al.”

“Mine too. It’s a fucking tear gas, even if it is a solid.”

We went outside and washed our faces with the hose, but it was not all that effective. Phenacyl bromide was scarcely soluble in water. Like oil, it would sort of spread around in water, but it wouldn’t wash away.

The night air was quiet, liquid and thick, a typical summer night in Columbia. Our faces were burning. The floral smells of the night—azaleas, camellias, rhododendrons, night-blooming jasmine—had been replaced by something wicked.

We ducked back into the garage and took the several hundred grams of phenacyl bromide off the filter and put it on trays that we set on the washer and dryer. The crystals drying in the trays looked perfect. We had made another organic chemical. We closed the door and left the exhaust fan on high. It was 3:00
A.M
.

Exhausted, but still remembering a modicum of conscience, we taped a
DO NOT ENTER
sign to the door. Backing out of the driveway, I could see blackened leaves gently blowing off the camellia. Oh well, Al’s mother had more camellias than she needed.

The next day, while Al and I were at our day job, his grandmother went into the garage to do the laundry. The moment she opened the door, the drying phenacyl bromide fumes hit her in the face like mace. When I arrived that evening, Al’s mother looked at us as if we were grandmother abusers. Al’s grandmother was not speaking to him. The good thing about gassing Al’s grandmother was that if anyone had complained that we had killed a big bush, we could respond, “Well, maybe, but at least Ganny’s still alive.”

We moved the lab. Al’s brother-in-law, Frank, had some land about twenty miles out into the country, where you could do just about whatever you wanted to do. We built a lab out of an old chicken coop and worked there for the next two summers.

At Georgia Tech I worked in a lab run by E. C. Ashby. He was interested in reductions with light-metal hydrides, which
meant that he liked to work with solutions in ether that would explode on exposure to moisture. Moisture was plentiful in Atlanta in the summer. When we were done with some experimental solution of lithium aluminum hydride, we would have a problem as to where to put it. Ashby’s solution was to take the well-sealed flasks home and host a party for the lab on the Fourth of July. The flasks would be floated out on his pond, and graduate students would shoot at them with a .22.