Dancing Naked in the Mind Field
by Kary Mullis
Bloomsbury Publishing, £7.99, 0747545537
Someone once observed that the real title of every book ever written is How To Be More Like Me, and Kary Mullis’s book is a good example. It is a free-ranging (or, if you prefer, shapeless) series of reflections on a disparate range of topics, somewhat in the style of Richard Feynman, whose entertaining memoirs were similarly untainted by modesty or self-doubt.
Awarded the 1993 Nobel Prize for Chemistry, Mullis has become most celebrated for his claim that HIV is not the cause of AIDS. Other things of which Mullis is skeptical include: “fancy” nutritional theories (“Some people eat too much; some people eat too little. Nothing else about diet really matters”), the case against OJ Simpson (“I just hope that I don’t ever get arrested back there”) and human impact on climate change (“We can stop worrying about whether we can control it because we don’t have anything to do with it”). Things which he is less skeptical include: astrology (three different strangers have independently and correctly identified him as a Capricorn), astral projection (his life was once saved by a passing astral traveler – whom he later married) and alien abductions (his own being heralded by an encounter with a luminescent talking raccoon).
By his own account, Mullis has taken more than his fair share of legal and illegal mind-altering substances but he seems unimpressed – or perhaps skeptical – about their likely role in some of these events.
I found the book irritatingly self-congratulatory and superficial but, then again, nobody is ever going to propose me for the Nobel Prize and the book jacket does carry effusive tributes from reviewers: “a Renaissance Man for the new millennium…”, “his magical mind . . .” etc., so perhaps I just need to join Kary in dropping some acid, hitting the surf and generally learning to chill out.
