Parenting & Family Quote by Kary Mullis

Mullis is sneaking a confession into a pastoral postcard: nostalgia is effortless because it edits for you. The grandfather’s farm arrives pre-sanitized, a ready-made origin story where danger exists only as a punchline you learn later. The black widow spiders aren’t just arachnids; they’re the adult world’s metadata, the unsettling footnotes that complicate a clean memory. “We didn’t know” is doing heavy lifting: innocence isn’t purity, it’s ignorance with good lighting.

The line also carries Mullis’s trademark contrarian swagger. He’s the scientist as raconteur, insisting that the hardest part of thinking isn’t the technical work but the narrative we wrap around it. Writing about boyhood is “so easy” because it’s low-stakes truth: no peer review, no replication crisis, no colleague emailing you to ask for your raw data. Childhood becomes a lab with no controls, where you can remember what you need and omit what doesn’t fit the story.

Context matters because Mullis cultivated a public persona that blurred genius, self-mythology, and provocation. PCR made him famous; his memoirish voice kept him legible. This quote hints at the seduction of autobiography for someone used to arguing against consensus: the past is one domain where you can be unchallenged, the sole authority. The subtext is a quiet warning about storytelling itself. Ease is not evidence. If the sentence feels cozy, that’s the point: it’s how a myth makes itself true.