TED2002
Kary Mullis: Play! Experiment! Discover!
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Biochemist Kary Mullis talks about the basis of modern science: the experiment. Sharing tales from the 17th century and from his own backyard-rocketry days, Mullis celebrates the curiosity, inspiration and rigor of good science in all its forms.
Kary Mullis - Biochemist
Kary Mullis won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for developing a way to copy a strand of DNA. (His technique, called PCR, jump-started the 1990s' biorevolution.) He's known for his wide-ranging interests -- and strong opinions. Full bio
Kary Mullis won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for developing a way to copy a strand of DNA. (His technique, called PCR, jump-started the 1990s' biorevolution.) He's known for his wide-ranging interests -- and strong opinions. Full bio
Double-click the English transcript below to play the video.
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I'll just start talking about the 17th century.
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I hope nobody finds that offensive.
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I -- you know, when I -- after I had invented PCR,
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I kind of needed a change.
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And I moved down to La Jolla and learned how to surf.
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And I started living down there on the beach for a long time.
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And when surfers are out waiting
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for waves,
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you probably wonder, if you've never been out there, what are they doing?
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You know, sometimes there's a 10-, 15-minute break out there
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when you're waiting for a wave to come in.
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They usually talk about the 17th century.
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You know, they get a real bad rap in the world.
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People think they're sort of lowbrows.
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One day, somebody suggested I read this book.
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It was called --
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it was called "The Air Pump,"
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or something like "The Leviathan and The Air Pump."
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It was a real weird book about the 17th century.
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And I realized, the roots
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of the way I sort of thought
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was just the only natural way to think about things.
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That -- you know, I was born thinking about things that way,
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and I had always been like a little scientist guy.
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And when I went to find out something,
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I used scientific methods. I wasn't real surprised,
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you know, when they first told me how --
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how you were supposed to do science,
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because I'd already been doing it for fun and whatever.
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But it didn't -- it never occurred to me
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that it had to be invented
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and that it had been invented
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only 350 years ago.
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You know, it was --
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like it happened in England, and Germany, and Italy
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sort of all at the same time.
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And the story of that,
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I thought, was really fascinating.
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So I'm going to talk a little bit about that,
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and what exactly is it that scientists are supposed to do.
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And it's, it's a kind of --
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You know, Charles I got beheaded
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somewhere early in the 17th century.
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And the English set up Cromwell
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and a whole bunch of Republicans or whatever,
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and not the kind of Republicans we had.
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They changed the government, and it didn't work.
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And
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Charles II, the son,
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was finally put back on the throne of England.
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He was really nervous, because his dad had been,
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you know, beheaded for being the King of England
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And he was nervous about the fact
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that conversations that got going
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in, like, bars and stuff
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would turn to --
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this is kind of -- it's hard to believe,
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but people in the 17th century in England
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were starting to talk about, you know,
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philosophy and stuff in bars.
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They didn't have TV screens,
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and they didn't have any football games to watch.
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And they would get really pissy,
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and all of a sudden people would spill out into the street and fight
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about issues like whether or not
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it was okay if Robert Boyle
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made a device called the vacuum pump.
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Now, Boyle was a friend of Charles II.
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He was a Christian guy during the weekends,
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but during the week he was a scientist.
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(Laughter)
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Which was -- back then it was
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sort of, you know, well, you know --
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if you made this thing -- he made this little device,
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like kind of like a bicycle pump
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in reverse that could suck all the air out of --
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you know what a bell jar is? One of these things,
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you pick it up, put it down, and it's got a seal,
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and you can see inside of it,
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so you can see what's going on inside this thing.
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But what he was trying to do was to pump all the air out of there,
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and see what would happen inside there.
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I mean, the first -- I think one of the first experiments he did
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was he put a bird in there.
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And people in the 17th century,
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they didn't really understand the same way we do
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about you know, this stuff is
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a bunch of different kinds of molecules,
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and we breathe it in for a purpose and all that.
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I mean, fish don't know much about water,
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and people didn't know much about air.
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But both started exploring it.
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One thing, he put a bird in there, and he pumped all the air out,
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and the bird died. So he said, hmm ...
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He said -- he called what he'd done as making --
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they didn't call it a vacuum pump at the time.
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Now you call it a vacuum pump; he called it a vacuum.
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Right? And immediately,
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he got into trouble with the local clergy
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who said, you can't make a vacuum.
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Ah, uh --
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(Laughter)
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Aristotle said that nature abhors one.
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I think it was a poor translation, probably,
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but people relied on authorities like that.
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And you know, Boyle says, well, shit.
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I make them all the time.
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I mean, whatever that is that kills the bird --
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and I'm calling it a vacuum.
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And the religious people said that
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if God wanted you to make --
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I mean, God is everywhere,
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that was one of their rules, is God is everywhere.
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And a vacuum -- there's nothing in a vacuum,
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so you've -- God couldn't be in there.
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So therefore the church said that you can't make a vacuum, you know.
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And Boyle said, bullshit.
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I mean, you want to call it Godless,
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you know, you call it Godless.
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But that's not my job. I'm not into that.
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I do that on the weekend. And like --
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what I'm trying to do is figure out what happens
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when you suck everything out of a compartment.
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And he did all these cute little experiments.
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Like he did one with -- he had a little wheel,
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like a fan, that was
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sort of loosely attached, so it could spin by itself.
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He had another fan opposed to it
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that he had like a --
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I mean, the way I would have done this would be, like, a rubber band,
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and, you know, around a tinker toy kind of fan.
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I know exactly how he did it; I've seen the drawings.
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It's two fans, one which he could turn from outside
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after he got the vacuum established,
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and he discovered that if he pulled all the air out of it,
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the one fan would no longer turn the other one, right?
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Something was missing, you know. I mean, these are --
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it's kind of weird to think that someone had to do an experiment to show that,
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but that was what was going on at the time.
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And like, there was big arguments about it
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in the -- you know, the gin houses and in the coffee shops and stuff.
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And Charles
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started not liking that.
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Charles II was kind of saying, you know, you should keep that --
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let's make a place where you can do this stuff
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where people don't get so -- you know,
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we don't want the -- we don't want to get the people mad at me again. And so --
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because when they started talking about religion
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and science and stuff like that,
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that's when it had sort of gotten his father in trouble.
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And so,
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Charles said, I'm going to put up the money
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give you guys a building,
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come here and you can meet in the building,
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but just don't talk about religion in there.
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And that was fine with Boyle.
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He said, OK, we're going to start having these meetings.
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And anybody who wants to do science is --
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this is about the time that Isaac Newton was starting to whip out
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a lot of really interesting things.
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And there was all kind of people that would come to the Royal Society,
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they called it. You had to be dressed up pretty well.
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It wasn't like a TED conference.
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That was the only criteria, was that you be --
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you looked like a gentleman, and they'd let anybody could come.
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You didn't have to be a member then.
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And so, they would come in and you would do --
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Anybody that was going to show an experiment,
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which was kind of a new word at the time,
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demonstrate some principle,
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they had to do it on stage, where everybody could see it.
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So they were --
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the really important part of this was,
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you were not supposed to talk
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about final causes, for instance.
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And God was out of the picture.
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The actual nature of reality was not at issue.
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You're not supposed to talk about the absolute nature of anything.
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You were not supposed to talk about anything
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that you couldn't demonstrate.
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So if somebody could see it, you could say, here's how the machine works,
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here's what we do, and then here's what happens.
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And seeing what happens, it was OK
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to generalize,
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and say, I'm sure that this will happen anytime
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we make one of these things.
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And so you can start making up some rules.
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You say, anytime you have a vacuum state,
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you will discover that one wheel will not turn another one,
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if the only connection between them
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is whatever was there before the vacuum. That kind of thing.
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Candles can't burn in a vacuum,
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therefore, probably sparklers wouldn't either.
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It's not clear; actually sparklers will,
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but they didn't know that.
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They didn't have sparklers. But, they --
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(Laughter)
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-- you can make up rules, but they have to relate
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only to the things that you've been able to demonstrate.
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And most the demonstrations had to do with visuals.
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Like if you do an experiment on stage,
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and nobody can see it, they can just hear it, they would probably think you were freaky.
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I mean, reality is what you can see.
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That wasn't an explicit rule in the meeting,
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but I'm sure that was part of it, you know. If people hear voices,
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and they can't see and associate it with somebody,
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that person's probably not there.
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But the general idea that you could only --
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you could only really talk about things in that place
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that had some kind of experimental basis.
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It didn't matter what Thomas Hobbes,
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who was a local philosopher,
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said about it, you know,
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because you weren't going to be talking final causes.
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What's happening here,
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in the middle of the 17th century,
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was that what became my field --
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science, experimental science --
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was pulling itself away,
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and it was in a physical way, because we're going to do it in this room over here,
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but it was also what -- it was an amazing thing that happened.
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Science had been all interlocked
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with theology, and philosophy,
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and -- and -- and mathematics,
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which is really not science.
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But experimental science had been tied up with all those things.
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And the mathematics part
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and the experimental science part
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was pulling away from philosophy.
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And -- things --
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we never looked back.
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It's been so cool since then.
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I mean, it just -- it just -- untangled a thing that was really impeding
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technology from being developed.
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And, I mean, everybody in this room --
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now, this is 350 short years ago.
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Remember, that's a short time.
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It was 300,000, probably, years ago
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that most of us, the ancestors of most of us in this room
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came up out of Africa and turned to the left.
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You know, the ones that turned to the right, there are some of those
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in the Japanese translation.
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But that happened very -- a long time ago
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compared to
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350 short years ago.
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But in that 350 years,
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the place has just undergone a lot of changes.
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In fact, everybody in this room probably,
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especially if you picked up your bag --
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some of you, I know, didn't pick up your bags --
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but if you picked up your bag, everybody in this room
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has got in their pocket, or back in their room,
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something
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that 350 years ago,
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kings would have gone to war to have.
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I mean, if you can think how important --
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If you have a GPS system and there are no satellites,
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it's not going to be much use. But, like --
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but, you know, if somebody had a GPS system
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in the 17th century
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some king would have gotten together an army
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and gone to get it, you know. If that person --
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Audience: For the teddy bear? The teddy bear?
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Kary Mullis: They might have done it for the teddy bear, yeah.
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But -- all of us own stuff.
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I mean, individuals own things
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that kings would have definitely gone to war to get.
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And this is just 350 years.
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Not a whole lot of people doing this stuff.
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You know, the important people --
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you can almost read about their lives,
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about all the really important people that made advances, you know.
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And, I mean --
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this kind of stuff, you know, all this stuff
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came from that separation
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of this little sort of thing that we do --
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now I, when I was a boy
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was born sort of with this idea
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that if you want to know something --
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you know, maybe it's because my old man was gone a lot,
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and my mother didn't really know much science,
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but I thought if you want to know something about stuff,
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you do it -- you make an experiment, you know.
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You get -- you get, like --
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I just had a natural feeling for science
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and setting up experiments. I thought that was the way everybody had always thought.
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I thought that anybody with any brains will do it that way.
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It isn't true. I mean, there's a lot of people --
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You know, I was one of those scientists that was --
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got into trouble the other night at dinner
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because of the post-modernism thing.
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And I didn't mean, you know -- where is that lady?
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Audience: Here.
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(Laughter)
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KM: I mean, I didn't really think of that as an argument
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so much as just a lively discussion.
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I didn't take it personally, but --
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I just -- I had -- I naively had thought,
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until this surfing experience started me into the 17th century,
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I'd thought that's just the way people thought,
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and everybody did, and they recognized reality
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by what they could see or touch or feel or hear.
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At any rate, when I was a boy,
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I, like, for instance, I had this --
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I got this little book from Fort Sill, Oklahoma --
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This is about the time that George Dyson's dad
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was starting to blow nuclear --
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thinking about blowing up nuclear rockets and stuff.
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I was thinking about making my own little rockets.
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And I knew that frogs -- little frogs --
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had aspirations of space travel,
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just like people. And I --
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(Laughter)
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I was looking for a --
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a propulsion system
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that would like, make a rocket, like,
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maybe about four feet high go up a couple of miles.
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And, I mean, that was my sort of goal.
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I wanted it to go out of sight and then I wanted this little parachute
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to come back with the frog in it.
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And -- I -- I --
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I got this book from Fort Sill, Oklahoma,
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where there's a missile base.
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They send it out for amateur rocketeers,
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and
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it said in there
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do not ever heat a mixture of potassium perchlorate and sugar.
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(Laughter)
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You know,
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that's what you call a lead.
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(Laughter)
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You sort of -- now you say, well, let's see if I can
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get hold of some potassium chlorate and sugar, perchlorate and sugar,
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and heat it; it would be interesting to see what it is they don't want me to do,
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and what it is going to --
and how is it going to work.
and how is it going to work.
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And we didn't have --
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like, my mother
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presided over the back yard
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from an upstairs window,
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where she would be ironing or something like that.
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And she was usually just sort of keeping an eye on,
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and if there was any puffs of smoke out there,
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she'd lean out and admonish us all
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not to blow our eyes out. That was her --
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You know, that was kind of the worst thing that could happen to us.
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That's why I thought, as long as I don't blow my eyes out ...
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I may not care about the fact
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that it's prohibited from heating this solution.
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I'm going to do it carefully, but I'll do it.
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It's like anything else that's prohibited:
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you do it behind the garage.
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(Laughter)
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So, I went to the drug store
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and I tried to buy some potassium perchlorate
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and it wasn't unreasonable then for a kid
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to walk into a drug store and buy chemicals.
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Nowadays, it's no ma'am,
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check your shoes. And like --
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(Laughter)
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But then it wasn't -- they didn't have any, but the guy had --
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I said, what kind of salts of potassium do you have? You know.
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And he had potassium nitrate.
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14:58
And I said, that might do the same thing, whatever it is.
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I'm sure it's got to do with rockets or it wouldn't be in that manual.
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And so I -- I did some experiments.
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15:06
You know, I started off with little tiny amounts
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of potassium nitrate and sugar,
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which was readily available,
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15:12
and I mixed it in different proportions,
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15:14
and I tried to light it on fire.
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Just to see what would happen, if you mixed it together.
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And it -- they burned.
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It burned kind of slow, but it made a nice smell,
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15:23
compared to other rocket fuels I had tried,
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that all had sulfur in them.
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15:27
And, it smelt like burnt candy.
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15:30
And then I tried the melting business, and I melted it.
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And then it melted into a little sort of syrupy liquid, brown.
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And then it cooled down to a brick-hard substance,
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15:40
that when you lit that,
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it went off like a bat.
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I mean, the little bowl of that stuff that had cooled down --
381
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15:46
you'd light it, and it would just start dancing around the yard.
382
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15:48
And I said, there
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is a way to get a frog up to where he wants to go.
384
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15:53
(Laughter)
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So I started developing --
386
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you know, George's dad had a lot of help. I just had my brother.
387
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But I -- it took me about -- it took me about,
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I'd say, six months
389
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to finally figure out all the little things.
390
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16:07
There's a lot of little things involved
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16:09
in making a rocket that it will actually work,
392
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16:11
even after you have the fuel.
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16:13
But you do it, by -- what I just--
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you know, you do experiments,
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16:17
and you write down things sometimes,
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16:18
you make observations, you know.
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16:20
And then you slowly build up a theory
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16:22
of how this stuff works.
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16:24
And it was -- I was following all the rules.
400
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16:26
I didn't know what the rules were,
401
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16:28
I'm a natural born scientist, I guess,
402
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16:30
or some kind of a throwback to the 17th century, whatever.
403
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3000
16:33
But at any rate, we finally did
404
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16:37
have a device that would reproduceably
405
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16:39
put a frog out of sight
406
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16:41
and get him back alive.
407
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16:43
And we had not --
408
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16:45
I mean, we weren't frightened by it.
409
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16:48
We should have been, because it made a lot of smoke
410
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16:50
and it made a lot of noise,
411
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16:52
and it was powerful, you know.
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16:54
And once in a while, they would blow up.
413
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16:56
But I wasn't worried, by the way,
414
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16:58
about, you know,
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17:00
the explosion causing the destruction of the planet.
416
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17:02
I hadn't heard about the 10 ways
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17:04
that we should be afraid of the --
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17:06
By the way,
419
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17:08
I could have thought,
420
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17:10
I'd better not do this because
421
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17:12
they say not to, you know.
422
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17:14
And I'd better get permission
from the government.
from the government.
423
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17:16
If I'd have waited around for that,
424
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17:18
I would have never -- the frog would have died, you know.
425
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17:22
At any rate, I bring it up because it's a good story,
426
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17:25
and he said, tell personal things, you know, and that's a personal --
427
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17:27
I was going to tell you about the first night that I met my wife,
428
1029000
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17:30
but that would be too personal, wouldn't it.
429
1032000
2000
17:33
So, so I've got something else that's not personal.
430
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17:35
But that ... process is what I think of as science,
431
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17:38
see, where you start with some idea,
432
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17:41
and then instead of, like, looking up,
433
1043000
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17:44
every authority that you've ever heard of
434
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17:46
I -- sometimes you do that,
435
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17:48
if you're going to write a paper later,
436
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2000
17:50
you want to figure out who else has worked on it.
437
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2000
17:52
But in the actual process, you get an idea --
438
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17:54
like, when I got the idea one night
439
1056000
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17:56
that I could amplify DNA with two oligonucleotides,
440
1058000
3000
17:59
and I could make lots of copies of some little piece of DNA,
441
1061000
2000
18:02
you know, the thinking for that
442
1064000
2000
18:04
was about 20 minutes while I was driving my car,
443
1066000
3000
18:08
and then instead of going -- I went back and I did talk to people about it,
444
1070000
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18:11
but if I'd listened to what I heard from all my friends who were molecular biologists --
445
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18:16
I would have abandoned it.
446
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18:18
You know, if I had gone back looking for an authority figure
447
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18:20
who could tell me if it would work or not,
448
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18:22
he would have said, no, it probably won't.
449
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18:24
Because the results of it were so spectacular
450
1086000
3000
18:28
that if it worked it was going to change everybody's goddamn way of doing molecular biology.
451
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18:31
Nobody wants a chemist to come in
452
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18:33
and poke around in their stuff like that and change things.
453
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18:36
But if you go to authority, and you always don't --
454
1098000
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18:38
you don't always get the right answer, see.
455
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2000
18:40
But I knew, you'd go into the lab
456
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18:42
and you'd try to make it work yourself. And then you're the authority,
457
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18:44
and you can say, I know it works,
458
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18:46
because right there in that tube
459
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18:48
is where it happened,
460
1110000
2000
18:50
and here, on this gel, there's a little band there
461
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2000
18:52
that I know that's DNA, and that's the DNA I wanted to amplify,
462
1114000
3000
18:55
so there!
So it does work.
So it does work.
463
1117000
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18:57
You know, that's how you do science.
464
1119000
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18:59
And then you say, well, what can make it work better?
465
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19:01
And then you figure out better and better ways to do it.
466
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19:03
But you always work from, from like, facts
467
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19:05
that you have made available to you
468
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3000
19:08
by doing experiments: things that you could do on a stage.
469
1130000
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19:10
And no tricky shit behind the thing. I mean, it's all --
470
1132000
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19:13
you've got to be very honest
471
1135000
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19:15
with what you're doing if it really is going to work.
472
1137000
2000
19:17
I mean, you can't make up results,
473
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2000
19:19
and then do another experiment based on that one.
474
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19:21
So you have to be honest.
475
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19:23
And I'm basically honest.
476
1145000
2000
19:25
I have a fairly bad memory, and dishonesty would always get me in trouble,
477
1147000
3000
19:28
if I, like -- so I've just sort of been naturally honest
478
1150000
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19:30
and naturally inquisitive,
479
1152000
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19:33
and that sort of leads to that kind of science.
480
1155000
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19:35
Now, let's see ...
481
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19:37
I've got another five minutes, right?
482
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3000
19:40
OK. All scientists aren't like that.
483
1162000
3000
19:44
You know -- and there is a lot --
484
1166000
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19:46
(Laughter)
485
1168000
2000
19:48
There is a lot -- a lot has been going on since
486
1170000
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19:50
Isaac Newton and all that stuff happened.
487
1172000
3000
19:53
One of the things that happened right around World War II
488
1175000
2000
19:55
in that same time period before,
489
1177000
2000
19:57
and as sure as hell afterwards,
490
1179000
2000
19:59
government got -- realized that scientists aren't strange dudes
491
1181000
3000
20:02
that, you know, hide in ivory towers
492
1184000
3000
20:05
and do ridiculous things with test tube.
493
1187000
3000
20:08
Scientists, you know, made World War II
494
1190000
2000
20:10
as we know it quite possible.
495
1192000
2000
20:12
They made faster things.
496
1194000
2000
20:15
They made bigger guns to shoot them down with.
497
1197000
3000
20:18
You know, they made drugs to give the pilots
498
1200000
3000
20:21
if they were broken up in the process.
499
1203000
3000
20:24
They made all kinds of -- and then finally one giant bomb
500
1206000
3000
20:27
to end the whole thing, right?
501
1209000
2000
20:29
And everybody stepped back a little and said, you know,
502
1211000
2000
20:31
we ought to invest in this shit,
503
1213000
2000
20:33
because whoever has got the most of these people
504
1215000
3000
20:36
working in the places is going to have a dominant position,
505
1218000
3000
20:39
at least in the military, and probably in all kind of economic ways.
506
1221000
3000
20:42
And they got involved in it, and the scientific
507
1224000
2000
20:44
and industrial establishment was born,
508
1226000
2000
20:46
and out of that came a lot of scientists
509
1228000
2000
20:48
who were in there for the money, you know,
510
1230000
3000
20:51
because it was suddenly available.
511
1233000
2000
20:53
And they weren't the curious little boys
512
1235000
2000
20:55
that liked to put frogs up in the air.
513
1237000
2000
20:57
They were the same people that later went in to medical school, you know,
514
1239000
3000
21:00
because there was money in it, you know. I mean, later, then they all got into business --
515
1242000
3000
21:03
I mean, there are waves of -- going into your high school,
516
1245000
3000
21:06
person saying, you want to be rich, you know, be a scientist. You know, not anymore.
517
1248000
3000
21:09
You want to be rich, you be a businessman.
518
1251000
2000
21:11
But a lot of people got in it for the money and the power and the travel.
519
1253000
3000
21:14
That's back when travel was easy.
520
1256000
3000
21:18
And those people don't think --
521
1260000
2000
21:20
they don't --
522
1262000
2000
21:22
they don't always tell you the truth, you know.
523
1264000
2000
21:24
There is nothing in their contract, in fact,
524
1266000
2000
21:26
that makes it to their advantage always,
525
1268000
2000
21:28
to tell you the truth.
526
1270000
2000
21:30
And the people I'm talking about are people that like --
527
1272000
3000
21:33
they say that they're a member of the committee
528
1275000
3000
21:36
called, say, the Inter-Governmental Panel on Climate Change.
529
1278000
4000
21:40
And they -- and they have these big meetings where they try to figure out
530
1282000
3000
21:44
how we're going to -- how we're going to continually prove
531
1286000
2000
21:46
that the planet is getting warmer,
532
1288000
3000
21:49
when that's actually contrary to most people's sensations.
533
1291000
3000
21:52
I mean, if you actually measure
534
1294000
2000
21:54
the temperature over a period --
535
1296000
2000
21:56
I mean, the temperature has been measured now
536
1298000
2000
21:58
pretty carefully for about 50, 60 years --
537
1300000
3000
22:01
longer than that it's been measured,
538
1303000
2000
22:03
but in really nice, precise ways,
539
1305000
2000
22:05
and records have been kept for 50 or 60 years,
540
1307000
3000
22:08
and in fact, the temperature hadn't really gone up.
541
1310000
2000
22:10
It's like, the average temperature
542
1312000
2000
22:12
has gone up a tiny little bit,
543
1314000
2000
22:14
because the nighttime temperatures
544
1316000
3000
22:17
at the weather stations have come up just a little bit.
545
1319000
2000
22:19
But there's a good explanation for that.
546
1321000
2000
22:21
And it's that the weather stations are all built outside of town,
547
1323000
3000
22:24
where the airport was, and now
548
1326000
2000
22:26
the town's moved out there, there's concrete all around
549
1328000
2000
22:28
and they call it the skyline effect.
550
1330000
2000
22:30
And most responsible people
551
1332000
2000
22:32
that measure temperatures realize
552
1334000
2000
22:34
you have to shield your measuring device from that.
553
1336000
2000
22:36
And even then, you know,
554
1338000
3000
22:39
because the buildings get warm in the daytime,
555
1341000
1000
22:40
and they keep it a little warmer at night.
556
1342000
2000
22:42
So the temperature has been, sort of, inching up.
557
1344000
2000
22:44
It should have been. But not a lot. Not like, you know --
558
1346000
3000
22:47
the first guy -- the first guy that got the idea
559
1349000
2000
22:49
that we're going to fry ourselves here,
560
1351000
2000
22:51
actually, he didn't think of it that way.
561
1353000
2000
22:53
His name was Sven Arrhenius. He was Swedish, and he said,
562
1355000
3000
22:56
if you double the CO2 level in the atmosphere,
563
1358000
3000
22:59
which he thought might -- this is in 1900 --
564
1361000
2000
23:02
the temperature ought to go up about 5.5 degrees, he calculated.
565
1364000
3000
23:05
He was thinking of the earth as, kind of like,
566
1367000
2000
23:07
you know, like a completely insulated thing
567
1369000
3000
23:10
with no stuff in it, really,
568
1372000
2000
23:12
just energy coming down, energy leaving.
569
1374000
2000
23:14
And so he came up with this theory,
570
1376000
2000
23:16
and he said, this will be cool,
571
1378000
2000
23:18
because it'll be a longer growing season in Sweden,
572
1380000
3000
23:21
you know, and the surfers liked it,
573
1383000
2000
23:23
the surfers thought, that's a cool idea,
574
1385000
2000
23:25
because it's pretty cold in the ocean sometimes, and --
575
1387000
3000
23:28
but a lot of other people later on
576
1390000
2000
23:30
started thinking it would be bad, you know.
577
1392000
2000
23:33
But nobody actually demonstrated it, right?
578
1395000
2000
23:35
I mean, the temperature as measured --
579
1397000
2000
23:37
and you can find this on our wonderful Internet,
580
1399000
2000
23:39
you just go and look for all NASAs records,
581
1401000
3000
23:42
and all the Weather Bureau's records,
582
1404000
2000
23:44
and you'll look at it yourself, and you'll see, the temperature has just --
583
1406000
3000
23:47
the nighttime temperature measured on the surface of the planet
584
1409000
3000
23:50
has gone up a tiny little bit.
585
1412000
2000
23:52
So if you just average that and the daytime temperature, it looks like it went up
586
1414000
2000
23:54
about .7 degrees in this century.
587
1416000
3000
23:57
But in fact, it was just coming up --
588
1419000
2000
23:59
it was the nighttime; the daytime temperatures didn't go up.
589
1421000
2000
24:01
So -- and Arrhenius' theory --
590
1423000
3000
24:04
and all the global warmers think --
591
1426000
2000
24:06
they would say, yeah, it should go up in the daytime, too,
592
1428000
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24:08
if it's the greenhouse effect.
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Now, people like things that have, like, names like that,
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that they can envision it, right? I mean --
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but people don't like things like this, so -- most -- I mean,
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you don't get all excited about things
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like the actual evidence, you know,
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which would be evidence for strengthening
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of the tropical circulation in the 1990s.
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It's a paper that came out in February,
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and most of you probably hadn't heard about it.
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"Evidence for Large Decadal Variability
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in the Tropical Mean Radiative Energy Budget."
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Excuse me. Those papers were published by NASA,
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and some scientists at Columbia, and Viliki
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and a whole bunch of people, Princeton.
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And those two papers came out in Science Magazine,
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February the first,
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and these -- the conclusion in both of these papers,
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and in also the Science editor's, like,
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descriptions of these papers, for, you know,
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for the quickie,
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is that our theories about global warming
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are completely wrong. I mean,
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what these guys were doing,
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and this is what -- the NASA people have been saying this for a long time.
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They say, if you measure the temperature of the atmosphere, it isn't going up --
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it's not going up at all. We've doing it very carefully now for 20 years,
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from satellites, and it isn't going up.
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And in this paper, they show something much more striking,
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and that was that they did what they call a radiation --
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and I'm not going to go into the details of it, actually it's quite complicated,
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but it isn't as complicated as they might make you think it is
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by the words they use in those papers. If you really get down to it, they say,
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the sun puts out a certain amount of energy --
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we know how much that is --
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it falls on the earth, the earth gives back a certain amount.
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When it gets warm it generates --
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it makes redder energy -- I mean, like infra-red,
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like something that's warm gives off infra-red.
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The whole business of the global warming --
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trash, really,
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is that -- if the -- if there's too much CO2 in the atmosphere,
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the heat that's trying to escape
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won't be able to get out. But the heat coming from the sun,
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which is mostly down in the -- it's like 350 nanometers,
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which is where it's centered -- that goes right through CO2.
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So you still get heated, but you don't dissipate any.
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Well, these guys measured all of those things.
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I mean, you can talk about that stuff,
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and you can write these large reports, and you can get government money to do it,
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but these -- they actually measured it,
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and it turns out that in the last 10 years --
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that's why they say "decadal" there --
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that the energy -- that the level
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of what they call "imbalance"
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has been way the hell over what was expected.
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Like, the amount of imbalance --
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meaning, heat's coming in and it's not going out
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that you would get from having double the CO2,
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which we're not anywhere near that, by the way.
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But if we did, in 2025 or something,
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have double the CO2 as we had in 1900,
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they say it would be increase the energy budget
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by about -- in other words,
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one watt per square centimeter more
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would be coming in than going out.
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So the planet should get warmer.
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Well, they found out in this study -- these two studies
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by two different teams --
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that five and a half watts
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per square meter
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had been coming in from 1998, 1999,
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and the place didn't get warmer.
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So the theory's kaput -- it's nothing.
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These papers should have been called,
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"The End to the Global Warming Fiasco," you know.
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They're concerned,
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and you can tell they have very guarded conclusions in these papers,
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because they're talking about big laboratories
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that are funded by lots of money
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and by scared people.
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You know, if they said, you know what?
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There isn't a problem with global warming any longer,
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so we can -- you know, they're funding.
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And if you start a grant request with something like that,
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and say, global warming obviously hadn't happened ...
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if they -- if they -- if they actually -- if they actually said that,
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I'm getting out.
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(Laughter)
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I'll stand up too, and --
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(Laughter)
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(Applause)
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They have to say that.
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They had to be very cautious.
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But what I'm saying is, you can be delighted,
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because the editor of Science, who is no dummy,
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and both of these fairly professional --
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really professional teams, have really come to the same conclusion
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and in the bottom lines in their papers
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they have to say, what this means is, that what we've been thinking,
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was the global circulation model that we predict
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that the earth is going to get overheated
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that it's all wrong. It's wrong by a large factor.
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It's not by a small one. They just --
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they just misinterpreted the fact that the earth --
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there's obviously some mechanisms going on
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that nobody knew about,
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because the heat's coming in and it isn't getting warmer.
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So the planet is a pretty amazing thing, you know,
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it's big and horrible -- and big and wonderful,
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and it does all kinds of things we don't know anything about.
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So I mean, the reason I put those things all together,
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OK, here's the way you're supposed to do science --
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some science is done for other reasons, and just curiosity.
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And there's a lot of things like global warming,
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and ozone hole and you know,
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a whole bunch of scientific public issues,
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that if you're interested in them,
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then you have to get down the details, and read the papers called,
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"Large Decadal Variability in the ... "
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You have to figure out what all those words mean.
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And if you just listen to the guys
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who are hyping those issues, and making a lot of money out of it,
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you'll be misinformed, and you'll be worrying about the wrong things.
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Remember the 10 things that are going to get you. The -- one of them --
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(Laughter)
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And the asteroids is the one I really agree with there.
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I mean, you've got to watch out for asteroids. OK, thank you for having me here.
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(Applause)
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ABOUT THE SPEAKER
Kary Mullis - BiochemistKary Mullis won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for developing a way to copy a strand of DNA. (His technique, called PCR, jump-started the 1990s' biorevolution.) He's known for his wide-ranging interests -- and strong opinions.
Why you should listen
In the early 1980s, Kary Mullis developed the polymerase chain reaction, an elegant way to make copies of a DNA strand using the enzyme polymerase and some basic DNA "building blocks." The process opened the door to more in-depth study of DNA -- like the Human Genome Project. Mullis shared the 1993 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for developing this technique.
As he tells it, after winning the Nobel Prize, his next career move was to learn how to surf. It's typical of Mullis, whose scientific method is to get deeply curious about a topic, work it out from first principles, and then imagine the next giant leap forward. As he puts it in his Nobel autobiography, revised several times since 1993, "I read a lot, and think a lot, and I can talk about almost anything. Being a Nobel laureate is a license to be an expert in lots of things as long as you do your homework."
Most recently, he's been taking a hard look at immunity; a recent patent from his company Altermune describes the redirection of an existing immune response to a new pathogen.
Kary Mullis | Speaker | TED.com