Science Quote by Kary Mullis

Mullis is doing something sly here: he flatters you and indicts you in the same breath. “Recipients” frames science not as a priesthood but as an inheritance - a set of tools, habits, and norms you didn’t personally invent but benefit from daily. The phrasing quietly shifts moral weight. If scientific method is a gift, passively consuming it starts to look like free-riding.

Then comes the bait-and-switch: “We can each be a creative and active part of it.” Not “support” it, not “trust” it - join it. Mullis, famous for inventing PCR and infamous for being allergic to intellectual deference, is selling a romantic image of science as hands-on improvisation. The subtext is anti-credentialism: the method is bigger than institutions, labs, or gatekeepers. That’s consistent with his persona - a Nobel laureate who delighted in puncturing consensus and performed contrarianism as a kind of scientific vitality.

Context matters, though. Late 20th-century science became both more powerful and more remote: biotechnology, computing, and big funding made discovery feel industrial. Mullis is pushing back against that alienation, insisting creativity is not a luxury add-on but the engine of the method itself. “If we so desire” is the tell. He’s not promising egalitarian outcomes; he’s offering permission. Science, in this telling, is a civic posture: curiosity plus rigor, available to anyone willing to submit their ideas to reality’s cross-examination.

It’s also a subtle rebuke to the era’s growing appetite for science-as-brand. Don’t just wear “I believe in science” like a bumper sticker. Learn the method, practice it, risk being wrong.