Dancing Naked in the Mind Field

Octavo, original black paper boards, original dust jacket. First edition, by Kary Mullis, winner of the 1993 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. "This is a darkly joyous work, an autobiography of the nervous system of an extraordinary chemist. I'm not sure that a human writer, as we normally perceive one, is in control here, but the results are delightful. Mullis begins with the event that changes his life, during a May 1983 nighttime drive through the mountains of Mendocino County in a silver Honda. Applying his knowledge of computer programming, Mullis mentally conjured up a technique of finding a specific sequence of DNA and replicating the hell out of it. 'Natural DNA is a tractless coil,' he says, 'like an unwound and tangled audiotape on the floor of the car in the dark.' The polymerase chain reaction makes sense of that tape" (New York Times). Mullis was co-awarded the Nobel Prize in 1993 with Canadian Michael Smith "for contributions to the developments of methods within DNA-based chemistry" and was individually recognized "for his invention of the polymerase chain reaction (PCR) method."