Dancing Naked in the Mind Field

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Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, Nov 17, 2010 - Biography & Autobiography - 240 pages
Here is a multidimensional playland of ideas from the world's most eccentric Nobel-Prize winning scientist. Kary Mullis is legendary for his invention of PCR, which redefined the world of DNA, genetics, and forensic science. He is also a surfer, a veteran of Berkeley in the sixties, and perhaps the only Nobel laureate to describe a possible encounter with aliens. A scientist of boundless curiosity, he refuses to accept any proposition based on secondhand or hearsay evidence, and always looks for the "money trail" when scientists make announcements.

Mullis writes with passion and humor about a wide range of topics: from global warming to the O. J. Simpson trial, from poisonous spiders to HIV, from scientific method to astrology. Dancing Naked in the Mind Field challenges us to question the authority of scientific dogma even as it reveals the workings of an uncannily original scientific mind.
 

Contents

The Invention of PCR
3
The Big Prizes
15
A Lab Is Just Another Place to Play
26
Fear and Lawyers in Los Angeles
44
The Realm of the Senses
64
Think Therefore I Wire
77
My Evening with Harry
83
Intervention on the Astral Plane
89
What Happened to Scientific Method?
107
The Attack of the Loxosceles reclusae
121
No Aliens Allowed
130
The 10000th Day
137
The Age of Nutritional Obsession
154
Case Not Closed
171
Am I a Machine?
191
Acknowledgments 271
211

Avogadros Number
96
Whos Minding the Store?
101

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About the author (2010)

Kary Mullis lives in La Jolla and Anderson Valley, California.

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