But I do have to respond to this:
But you just had to smear him - provide the old CIA talking points? Cause why? When he said not to use the PCR for diagnostic purposes because it can't, that really brought out your memory of his drug use? But you feel the PCR is valid, right? Let's look at the validity of the man who hailed the benefits of the RT PCR test which went on to provide the statistical basis for the “Pandemic.”
Questioning whether someone really made a highly dubious statement that is credited to him by antivax misinformationists is not smearing him. On the contrary, it's helping to protect his reputation, because it would be extremely damaging to the reputation of a Nobel Prize winning scientist to make such an unscientific claim. Various fact-checkers have looked into this claim and reported that Kary Mullis did not, in fact, say it.
Fullfact.org wrote this: The inventor of PCR never said it wasn’t designed to detect infectious diseases. Quote from this article: "He didn’t say PCR testing couldn’t be used for testing for any diseases, as some social media posts claim. Confusion seems to have arisen from quotes of his in a 1996 article about HIV and AIDS. In this, neither the author of the article, nor Dr Mullis said PCR testing does not work or only identifies the DNA or RNA of the person being tested.
The author actually quotes Dr Mullis as saying “Quantitative PCR is an oxymoron” within the context of testing viral load (the amount of virus present) in people with HIV. This doesn’t mean he thought PCR testing didn’t work at all, but that there are limitations in detecting the specific levels of a virus from a sample using PCR testing.
USA Today also debunked this claim: Fact check: Comments from PCR test creator lacking context in social media post. Others have also debunked it. Kary Mullis did not, in fact, make a completely scientific and untrue claim that PCR cannot detect infectious organisms.
As for his drug use, I heard this directly from someone who knew him. According to his friend, Kary Mullis credited coming up with the idea of PCR while under the influence of a mind-altering drug. Kary Mullis had told him that the idea came into his head while he was going home from a party after partaking. While I cannot provide a reference to what a guest lecturer said to my graduate student group, I *can* provide references that corroborate the fact that Mullis was into mind-bending hallucinogenics: Intolerable Genius: Berkeley’s Most Controversial Nobel Laureate. While this article does mention Mullis' drug use and the epiphany he had while driving which led to the invention of PCR, it does not put the two together the way Mullis' friend described.
Quote: “I had read a lot about astrophysics and had taken some psychoactive drugs, which enhanced my perceived understanding of the cosmos,” Mullis recalled in his memoir, Dancing Naked in the Mind Field.
Fittingly, Mullis’s epiphany came in his car, while driving through the hills of Mendocino County. He reasoned that by attaching two oligonucleotides to a split strand of DNA, he could isolate a desired section, such as the segment of DNA that determines sickle cell anemia.
Since Kary Mullis himself freely admitted to using hallucinogenic drugs, I hardly think that reporting this is "smearing" him. Also, I can greatly admire his work while acknowledging his personal faults.
PCR is an extremely difficult technique to learn, with a very sharp learning curve. It took me many tries before I could get it to work. When I finally overcame that barrier, it worked for me all the time. But getting there was difficult. I used to tell students that in order to get PCR to work, one must make sacrifices, preferably of something cute like an undergraduate student or a butterfly, ideally under the light of a full moon. So, yeah, I am in complete awe of the mind that not only thought of the idea but persevered to make it work.
Finally, I will end this with some links to descriptions of how PCR works. I hope they are not too technical for you.
Polymerase chain reaction (PCR) This Khan Academy article is meant to give an overview to freshman level college students.
Basic Molecular Biology: PCR and Real-Time PCR – Principle of PCR. This short (2m23s) video is meant to explain PCR to laypeople.
The upshot of both of these links is that without the sequence that the PCR is designed to detect, nothing happens during the PCR reaction. PCR can *only* detect something that is there.
A beginner’s guide to RT-PCR, qPCR and RT-qPCR This guide describes the differences between Reverse Transcriptase PCR (RT-PCR), quantitative PCR (qPCR) and Reverse Transcriptase quantitative PCR (RT-qPCR). The terminology can be confusing, since we usually call qPCR "real-time" PCR since the quantitative reaction is measured in real time.
No one who understands even the basics of PCR would ever believe that PCR cannot be used to identify virus species and variants within those species. But antivax screeds aren't aimed at people who have basic understanding of science, are they? They're aimed at people who barely scraped by in their high school science classes.
Just not going to read it - not worth my time.
Sod off Swampy, as the old saying goes.