Book Review - Dancing Naked in the Mind Field
Author: Kary Mullis
Category: Autobiography
Quiver Score: 4.25/5
Kary Mullis is probably more famous today, posthumously, than he became nearly thirty years ago when he won the Nobel Prize in chemistry. The reason for his fame is the same in both cases: he is the inventor of the Polymerase Chain Reaction, otherwise known as the PCR. In the age of COVID, which Kary did not live to see by only a few months – conveniently for his adversaries such as Anthony Fauci – PCR has spread like a virus through the global lexicon.
Dancing Naked in the Mind Field, the autobiography of Kary Mullis, published in 1998, is reminiscent of another Nobel Prize winning autobiography, Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!. Dr. Mullis and Dr. Feynman had a great deal in common, including their incomprehensible genius, witty humour, and unapologetic love for women. I don’t recall if Feynman also had a penchant for psychoactive substances, but Kary Mullis sure did and had the savvy to invent new ones in his lab. He was certainly not the first inventor to augment creativity with a little LSD, and the deputy D.A. from northern California, Rocky Harmon, during the O.J. Simpson trial, tried to exploit his occasional LSD use to undermine his credibility. This is where the real beauty of Kary Mullis shines: he simply did not care what people thought of him or his actions and instead consistently maintained allegiance to his authenticity and integrity.
These laudable traits simultaneously bolstered his character and hampered his career, and potentially cut his life short, as he refused to be complicit with or silent about any nefarious acts by his colleagues, and where proof had not been demonstrated, he rebuffed any scientific dogmas. “We have to be aware – when someone comes on the seven o’clock news with word that the global temperature is going up,” writes Mullis, “…that the media are at the mercy of the scientists who have the ability to summon them and that the scientists who have such ability are not often minding the store. More likely, they are minding their own livelihoods.” Sound familiar? “Who are the people…arranging scientific symposia and stories for the media?” he continues. “Those people – who are always having to come up with imminent disasters that can be prevented by governmental projects… – are manipulating you.”
What dogmas did he challenge? Global warming for one. Or is it cooling? Let’s just call it climate change…for convenience. In speaking of the agenda of the climate change cartel, even 20+ years ago, he says of the climate, “…that the thing that is absolutely constant here is serious change.” That’s simply the nature of climate.
What about the hole in the ozone? No evidence of it whatsoever, he writes, and bolsters his position by informing that if a hole in the ozone layer existed, “UV rays from the sun would come through that hole and strike the Earth’s atmosphere…be absorbed by oxygen…and make more ozone.” He fortifies this argument by declaring that even with the backing of all the nations of the world, the ozone layer could not be eliminated.
And he challenged perhaps the world’s biggest medical doctrine, pre-COVID anyway, that HIV is the cause of AIDS. He attests in his autobiography, as many still do today, that there has never been any proof that HIV causes AIDS. None whatsoever. But for big pharma and governments, billions of dollars, if not trillions, were to be made on life-threatening drugs such as AZT and the propagation of the stigma of the “perversions” that were a sure bet to lead to the “death-sentence” diagnosis of AIDS. The bitter irony is that, since HIV+ equals AIDS has become a canon of medicine, the PCR test has been used to fraudulently consign millions into the abysmal category of future AIDS patients. And today, with propaganda fueling another insidious acronym, history is repeating itself.
Despite the gravity of some of the topics, Kary Mullis crafted Dancing Naked into a romping, hilarious read. He weaves into the narrative his love for surfing, fascination of astrology, admittedly hard-to-deny encounters with astral travel, and a harrowing experience with venomous spiders. Each chapter presents a light-hearted, entertaining tale or rant about considerations that are still highly relevant today, potentially more now than ever. Through all his experiences, he never wavered in his integrity or authenticity – attributes scarcely found in the upper echelons of science today. Would Kary Mullis take the shifty COVID-19 narrative to task if he were still alive? Fortunately for those who are coming “up with imminent disasters that can be prevented by governmental projects,” we will never know, but one does not have to read between the lines of this incredible autobiography to understand that there are holes in the narrative big enough for him to carve his longboard through again and again.
Dancing Naked in the Mind Field is a fascinating account of one man’s attempt to make sense of the curiosities of this planet and the madness of its human inhabitants. “Welcome to Earth,” he concludes the book. “It’s a little confusing at first. That’s why you have to come back over and over again before you learn to really enjoy yourself.”
