Somewhat reminds me of Bob Widlar - who was an alcoholic, aggressive, confrontation-seeking jerk, but at the same time he was also one of the biggest genius of the last century, when it comes to electronics engineering.
It's mentioned, but his memoir, Dancing Naked in the Mind Field, is absolutely worth the read. It's a quick read, bouncing between inventing PCR and meeting aliens. His views on all sorts of things—HIV/AIDS is the big one—were atrocious, but his life (as told by him) was a fair balance for getting to understand the guy.
I thought it would be Robert Trivers who had some rough spots in his academic career, but I was wrong! Trivers is in biology, which has no Nobel prize.
Trivers instead got the Crafoord Prize, which awards $500,000. See what Steven Pinker said about Trivers' ideas:
> In Esquire Yoffe wrote that “… genius and gentility don’t always share the same chromosome.”
That writer is ignorant of the truth.
The truth is that very few people want to take responsibility for their ideals, attitudes, and behaviors, plus their self-evolution or lack thereof, of them, with respect to their compassionate treatment of others. That's always wherefrom the cult of personality springs forth.
The vast majority of such aholes have nothing to blame but their choices and their selfishness and their lack of seeing any problem with them, although there are physical problems in a very small percentage of people that can cause damage to one's instincts, moral compass, and self-control, among them the results of various substances.
> Schekman, who calls Mullis’s Nobel a “complete fluke,” compares him to the man in the White House. “He’s the molecular biology equivalent of Donald Trump in terms of his personal behavior,” he says.
Priceless.
The key to that ahole's life is that his use of LSD damaged his sense of morality and comprehension of the truth. As glorious Finland have demonstrated, the ability to learn how to know when something is true or not is within not only our human capacity, but within a pedagogic system. On the negative side of this human ability, we can also choose to believe any horsesh_t our minds latch onto, as we can always to choose to reject any evidence we deem "inconsequential".
The general populace's inability to recognize a liar then makes them susceptible to charismatic fools and charlatans. That the power structures of our societies reward and protect those "accomplished" tricksters is another layer to the problem.
We are all the sum-total of the moral choices of our lifetime, which have an inertia in opposition to our ability to veer in a different direction.
As Don Juan tells Castaneda, the use of "power plants" (hallucinagenic drugs) is overall bad for the body and should be avoided. Don Juan only used them on Carlos because Carlos was so stubborn, and needed the jolt, if the book's premises are to be believed.
This basically presents him as an idiot that just got very lucky once - a
"complete fluke," that had an unfortunately awful personality... and then goes on to try and spread the credit for his invention to other people that did trivial and straightforward parts of proving he was right after the fact.
You cannot separate his weirdness from his ability to invent PCR: his unconventional way of thinking is exactly what made both his discovery and his behaviors and personality. It is quite frankly, disgusting that our culture and scientific community cannot accept intellectual diversity and neurodiversity, and people like him that are different enough to actually bring a new perspective are systematically pushed out.
If they're accepted at all, it is the Rudolph the Red Nose Reindeer story- only as long and because they are useful, while constantly needing to provide massive value that others don't have to provide, just to exist in the same spaces while being neurodivergent.
I've had the opportunity to know and work with a few people that were just as "weird" as Mullis and had ideas just as good- but all were pushed out fast enough they didn't get to contribute anything and/or the credit was stolen entirely. Of two of the smartest and weirdest colleagues I've known as scientists- one is now an off the grid subsistence farmer in the middle of nowhere, the other dead by suicide. Both were capable of far more than any of the people that pushed them out.
Ugh. Here's a crazy thought: instead of trying to cancel everyone who says something you disagree with, maybe you can just remember them for the thing they accomplished, and ignore the parts you don't like? It's embarrassing that this headline is in a magazine published by a major university.
People are complex. When you throw out everyone for the worst thing they ever said or did, you don't have anyone left -- other than the people who haven't disappointed you yet [1].
[1] or worse...the people whom you refuse to see honestly.
The funny thing is that the article remembers him, and it remembers him for both his good and bad attributes. I think that’s really the way to do it. “Oh yeah that guy was an asshole adulterer and invented PCR.”
Yeah, I know. But the headline is so egregiously anti-intellectual that it's embarrassing to see it in an academic context. And it's worse, because they're doing it to cater to their audience.
Then of course, they had to make it explicitly political, with the inclusion of this quote:
> Schekman, who calls Mullis’s Nobel a “complete fluke,” compares him to the man in the White House. “He’s the molecular biology equivalent of Donald Trump in terms of his personal behavior,” he says.
And they end the article with this line:
> Maybe the best way to remember Mullis and his invention of PCR is to make some space for the others who made it a reality.
It's just childishness. Whatever other bad things the man did, he really did invent PCR, which changed the world forever.
I think it’s very interesting that hitler was an aspiring painter, really gives a window into his psychology. I’m glad they bothered to write that down in the history books. Is your argument that they shouldn’t have, or are you just reflexively responding to some wrong perception I’m attempting to launder the reputations of bad people.
>His views on AIDS didn’t just look bad, they may have had deadly consequences. By the late 1990s, South Africa was in the midst of a catastrophic AIDS epidemic. President Thabo Mbeki, under the spell of AIDS denialists including Mullis, declared that AIDS was caused by poverty, not HIV. Many South Africans were denied access to treatment. A 2008 study published in the Journal of Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndromes estimated that as a result, 35,000 babies were born with HIV and 330,000 South Africans died of AIDS unnecessarily.
and
>At some point during their interview in his apartment, Mullis grabbed her by the neck and tried to forcibly kiss her. She rebuffed him. But he tried again. And again. He asked her, “How can you say you know me without sleeping with me?”
“People are complex” is true but complexity is not ignoring a person’s totality. Complexity is holding multiple, sometimes contradictory, things in one’s mind at once. Mullis can be intolerable but still responsible for something meaningful. I can enjoy his book and believe PCR to be a top-5 invention of the past century, but not want the guy over for dinner. That’s what intolerable means, and that’s what the piece is doing. “This guy did an astounding thing but oof.”
> Complexity is holding multiple, sometimes contradictory, things in one’s mind at once.
Yes!
> Mullis can be intolerable but still responsible for something meaningful.
Sort of! Agree with the spirit of the sentence, but "intolerable" is a blanket statement. Intolerable to whom?
OK, so you don't want to have him over to dinner. That's fine; I get it. But do we just start calling people "intolerable" if a large number of people don't like them? Should UC Berkeley Alumni magazine publish a puff piece on "The Intolerable Joe Biden"?
The article goes into plenty of detail about large numbers of people who knew him being unwilling or unable to tolerate him. The use of the word makes sense here. As well as the negatives, the article also celebrates his successes, rather than attempting to cancel.
People are complex. When you throw out everyone for the worst thing they ever said or did, you don't have anyone left -- other than the people who haven't disappointed you yet.
> The article doesn't attempt to throw him out or cancel him for the worst things he said and did
The last line of the article is:
"Maybe the best way to remember Mullis and his invention of PCR is to make some space for the others who made it a reality."
Petty. This is in addition to aspersions like this one:
"Despite knowing little about molecular biology, Mullis was hired to work in the company’s DNA synthesis lab"
Also, there's a direct comparison to Trump for some unfathomable reason (well...unfathomable except that, again, to the readers of a magazine from Berkeley, that means that Mullis is a bad man).
Is this "cancellation"? I don't know. But it's pretty darned immature, and a blatant attempt to tear down the guy in relation to his one objective accomplishment.
As for word choice: pretty much every famous person has a large contingency who cannot stand them, so I guess it's fair game now to just call them all "intolerable". C'est la vie.
The measure of a person is not what they've done in their past, but how, why, and what they're going about doing lately.
A person can be measured by their ideals, attitudes, and behaviors.
So, yeah, the unrepentant don't deserve a seat at the table. Their science can stay, however, and the fact that they played a part remembered. But that's more than enough for people for whom nothing good can be said about.
As an American, I'm ready to eject Thomas Jefferson from the front of our money, for one.
I use the term "great and terrible" (like Oz). We've had many great and terrible people. I find it useful to know that people who are geniuses can also be total jerks and idiots.
What's important is that Mullis had a long history of behavior that crossed over from "antisocial" to "sociopathic".
