Kary Banks Mullis was born in Lenoir, North Carolina, in 1944, the son of Cecil Banks Mullis and Bernice Alberta (Barker) Fredericks. Upon graduation from Georgia Tech in 1966 with a B.S. degree in chemistry, Mullis entered the doctoral program in biochemistry at the University of California, Berkeley. In Berkeley at that time there was growing interest in hallucinogenic drugs; Mullis taught a controversial neurochemistry class on the subject. His thesis adviser, Joe Nielands, told Omni that as a graduate student Mullis was "very undisciplined and unruly; a free spirit." Yet at the age of twenty-four, he wrote a paper on the structure of the universe that was published by Nature magazine. He was awarded his Ph.D. in 1973, and he accepted a teaching position at the University of Kansas Medical School in Kansas City, where he stayed for four years. In 1977, he assumed a postdoctoral fellowship at the...