Dr Kary Mullis - Nobel Prize Winner

[Chief Stipe]

Some one brought my attention to the following about Kary Mullis that was posted elsewhere by a very short Vet.  I'm disappointed that he would fall for this fake news as I did give him some credit for having some intelligence and a modicum of understanding of the scientific method.  I didn't think for a moment that he would profess to know more than a Nobel prize winner.

Dr Kary Mullis died in 2019.  He won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry 1993 for his invention of the PCR testing method in 1985.  The method that many of us are now familiar with because of its extensive use in the Covid-19 pandemic.

In the following video Mullis calls Dr Fauci a fraud (well before the Covid-19 pandemic began) and gives some very good reasons why.  However the key point Mullis makes is that the PCR test was not designed to test for disease and that it was being misused.  The PCR test essentially uses a naturally occurring reaction (Polymerase Chain Reaction) to detect molecules of a substance.  It can  be adjusted to identify any molecule by the use of primer agents.  The PCR reaction can be run through amplification cycles - the greater the number of cycles the greater the level of detection and the smaller the level of molecules that can be detected.  This is its advantage but also its biggest disadvantage.  

If you increase the replication cycles then you can detect very very minute fragments and levels of a virus for example.  However at high replication cycles the detected virus may not represent infection or disease.  As Mullis says at high cycles you can detect one molecule or a fragment of one molecule that is never going to be infectious nor reach disease status.

Now this is where Mullis is misquoted with regard to HIV.  He said that a PCR test may identify HIV being present but that doesn't mean that the person will become infectious or develop AID's.  He is quoted as being convinced that HIV is not the sole cause of AIDS and that other viruses may be involed as well as a complex body immune response (although he didn't specifically refer to it one could compare this theory with cases of cytokine storm response to Covid-19). However his views were more nuanced than that -

With regard to the viral-load tests, which attempt to use PCR for counting viruses, Mullis has stated: “Quantitative PCR is an oxymoron.” PCR is intended to identify substances qualitatively, but by its very nature is unsuited for estimating numbers. Although there is a common misimpression that the viral-load tests actually count the number of viruses in the blood, these tests cannot detect free, infectious viruses at all; they can only detect proteins that are believed, in some cases wrongly, to be unique to HIV. The tests can detect genetic sequences of viruses, but not viruses themselves 

It is on the use of PCR testing that he is particularly critical of Fauci.

He had many controversial views on a number of topics and believed that human activity was not the major cause of Climate Change.  He may or may not be correct on that but he did put forward a clear scientific hypthesis that was at odds with the current consensus (Check out this website https://everythingclimate.org/).