Early Life and Education
Mullis was born in Lenoir, North Carolina, near the Blue Ridge Mountains, on December 28, 1944. His family had a background in farming in this rural area. As a child, Mullis recalls, he was interested in observing organisms in the countryside. He grew up in Columbia, South Carolina, where he attended Dreher High School.
Mullis earned a Bachelor of Science degree in chemistry from the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta in 1966, during which time he got married and started a business. He then received a Ph.D. in biochemistry from the University of California, Berkeley in 1972; his research focused on synthesis and structure of proteins. Following his graduation, Mullis became a postdoctoral fellow in pediatric cardiology at the University of Kansas Medical School, going on to complete two years of postdoctoral work in pharmaceutical chemistry at the University of California, San Francisco.
Read more about this topic: Kary Mullis
Famous quotes containing the words early, life and/or education:
“In the course of twenty crowded years one parts with many illusions. I did not wish to lose the early ones. Some memories are realities, and are better than anything that can ever happen to one again.”
—Willa Cather (1873–1947)
“The life of mind is best and pleasantest for man, since mind more than anything else is man. This life therefore is also the happiest.”
—Aristotle (384–323 B.C.)
“What does education often do? It makes a straight-cut ditch of a free, meandering brook.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)