Last of The Great Tinkerers

The idea that would revolutionize biology flashed into the mind of a hippie- holdout biochemist during a midnight drive in 1983. While winding through the mountains of Northern California, Kary Mullis envisioned a way of easily copying a single fragment of DNA in a chain reaction that so surprised him, he pulled his Honda Civic off the road to admire the view in his mind's eye.

Mullis instantly recognized he had solved a problem that had fettered genetic research for decades: the fact that DNA samples are often too meager to work with. He turned to his girlfriend, also a biochemist, to explain his idea. "I thought this was a really cool invention that would make me famous," he recalls, "but she wasn't terribly thrilled about it."

She was wrong. The polymerase chain reaction has revolutionized biology and made Mullis famous, though it has not altered his oddball life. A scientific cross pollinator, Mullis, 46, may be the last of the great tinkerers. His passions include cosmology, mathematics, artificial intelligence, virology, chemistry, hallucinogenics, photography and women who are 10,000 days old. At that age, about 28, "they're like a ripe avocado," says the thrice-married inventor.

Other scientists call Mullis a genius, but he offers a more modest explanation for his endless creativity: a fervent desire to avoid drudgery and have more time to play. As a boy in South Carolina, he transformed parts from the family washing machine into an automatic door opener so that he could let the dog out each morning without leaving his bed. As an adult, he invented a system to dim lights simply by thinking erotic thoughts. Even PCR was an attempt to devise a less laborious way of copying DNA than the method used by living cells. "When I saw how nature does it, I thought, 'That's totally crazy.' " he says.

For his great invention, Mullis got nothing more than a one-time $10,000 bonus from his former employer, Cetus. Today he works and lives out of rented rooms on a beach near San Diego. A consultant for biotech firms, he lectures and plays as much as he can. His latest game: photographing women wearing nothing but multicolored patterns of light. His ideas continue to bubble forth like an uncontrolled chemical reaction. He believes the AIDS virus alone cannot account for the epidemic. He wants to create a computer program that will trick the senses into believing they've landed in an amusement park as real as Disneyland. "Much of what Kary says is nonsense," says a friend. But sometimes what he says is so stunning that it may earn him a Nobel Prize.