American chemist and winner of the Nobel Prize at age 48. He was notified of the selection naming him winner on 13 October 1993 and received the award on 10 December 1993, sharing the prize with Michael Smith of the University of B.C. in Vancouver. As a chemist for Cetus Corporation in Emeryville, California, 1983, Mullis began puzzling over a DNA-sequencing experiment one April night. He came up with the polymerize chain reaction that makes it possible to reproduce DNA from minute amounts up to quantities. Mullis and Smith shared the Nobel honorarium of $825,000.
Mullis was a bright active kid, always experimenting with some project. Living on the coast at La Jolla, California, he was a surfer from the time he was a youth and was an unlikely example of a scientist in his patterned surfing shorts, as well as an unconventional lifestyle and opinions that were not bounded by academic limitations. Open to the possibility of alien visits and questioning the nature of ESP, he said that “Astrology has some scientific basis and probably has done more than psychiatry to help people understand their lives.”
Mullis earned his Ph.D. in biochemistry at UC Berkeley. He worked with Cetus Corp 1979-1986 and was Director of Molecular Biology at Xytronyx Inc in San Diego 1986-1988. In 1993, he was awarded a science prize from Japan with a $385,000 cash award.
He was married four times and had a total of three children by two of his wives. Kary Mullis died on 7 August 2019 at the age of 74 in Newport Beach, California.
Link to Wikipedia biography