Holy shit,' Mullis cries out, and his girlfriend almost, but not quite, wakes up. He pulls the Honda to the side of the road to write down his ideas and check his calculations. Within feverish minutes, the problem is solved, and Mullis is left with the mop-up operation of getting PCR actually to work. This takes almost two years, and the original report was famously rejected by both Nature and Science . That's Mullis's version.
Lone genius tends to make better copy, especially when it is spiced with smouldering resentment.
Mullis repeatedly asserts that he was ripped off financially by the greedy confederacy of dunces who were his colleagues at Cetus. Dancing Naked is partly an autobiography, mostly an explosive voiding of rheum on the idiocies of contemporary science and culture. Because of the Nobel Prize, I am a free agent. So he's going to give us all a piece of his magical mind, and he doesn't give a toss what anybody thinks. Mullis is a Capricorn.