This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
This atlas's own standard for a claim is evidence first, and Kary Mullis's later career is a useful, uncomfortable test of what that standard means in practice, because the same man produced both a landmark of twentieth century evidence based science and, afterward, a set of public claims that evidence plainly did not support.
Mullis did no research into HIV or AIDS. He nonetheless argued publicly that HIV had not been shown to cause AIDS, a position virology's own accumulated evidence, built over decades by researchers working in the field, did not support, and the mainstream scientific and medical consensus rejected. That argument did not stay confined to debate: South African President Thabo Mbeki cited AIDS denialist reasoning of exactly this kind in shaping his government's HIV and AIDS policy in the early 2000s, delaying antiretroviral treatment access, and researchers have since estimated the policy contributed to roughly 330,000 preventable deaths and 35,000 HIV positive births in South Africa between 1999 and 2008. Mullis also expressed skepticism of human caused climate change and described paranormal experiences, including an encounter he said involved a glowing raccoon, publicly and without irony.
None of this touches the polymerase chain reaction itself. PCR's validity does not rest on Mullis's later credibility; it rests on the fact that the technique has been independently replicated, refined and verified by tens of thousands of researchers across four decades, in a way his HIV and climate claims never were and never sought to be. Scientists have a name for the pattern his career illustrates, an accomplished specialist trading on real authority in one field to make unsupported claims in others: Nobel disease. The name is only half serious. The consequences, in Mullis's case, were not.