Parenting & Family Quote by Kary Mullis

There is a mischievous dare tucked inside Mullis's nostalgia: a Nobel-winning scientist casually reminiscing about a childhood where you could buy dynamite fuse like it was kite string. The line is engineered to provoke. It makes modern safety culture look timid, even faintly absurd, while casting midcentury America as a freer, more improvisational lab for the curious kid.

The specific intent isn’t really about explosives. It’s about permission - cultural, parental, civic - to tinker without constant supervision. “Weird things” is doing a lot of work: it sanctifies the oddball impulse that later becomes experimental science, while implying that today’s childhood is over-managed, over-lawyered, and under-adventurous. By choosing an extreme example (100 feet of fuse), Mullis leans into the myth of the self-made inventor: danger as a training ground, risk as character formation, curiosity as something you prove by flirting with consequences.

The subtext also carries a Southern, postwar small-town texture: local hardware stores as informal institutions, regulation as distant, and community norms substituting for formal safeguards. That’s not pure romance; it’s a selective memory that edits out the kids who got hurt and the inequalities baked into who got to treat the world as a playground. Mullis, famously contrarian, uses that friction intentionally. He’s not just recalling a time; he’s staking a claim that scientific creativity comes from environments that tolerate oddness, mess, and yes, a little recklessness - the kind that makes authorities nervous and innovators feel alive.