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Authors: Kary Mullis
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front of me that lets me see what’s on the screen in front of the jury. I have to lean down to see it.”
“Oh.” She laughed reluctantly, without losing the offensive, “But it looks like you’re sleeping.”
My mother is seldom impressed by alternative explanations of her own discoveries. I kept her observation in mind for future reference. She also doesn’t approve of my language, although I explain to her that it is expressive.
Back in San Diego, I thought about what my least favorite image from the trial was. When the verdict was announced and the tired jury was released, the district attorney of Los Angeles County, who had mostly stayed clear of the courtroom, roped all the prosecutors together, and in front of the cameras, they cried. They cried because they had not been able to convict O. J. Simpson.
Did it ever occur to them that the reason we had a trial, the reason we hired them in the first place, is because sometimes the man that the police arrest is innocent? Is it reasonable for a prosecutor to cry when a long-suffering jury comes to a decision and acquits a defendant, who is therefore by our highest standard innocent?
I just hope that I don’t ever get arrested back there.
In La Jolla I live on the beach across from one of the nicest surf breaks in California. Waves are intricate things. Our best waves in La Jolla are born way out in the Pacific when a storm,maybe as far away as New Zealand, a storm with a low pressure area, pulls up a huge convex mass of water from the ocean. It literally sucks it up over a period of days, maybe a few feet above sea level at the center, and the water falls back into the sea, and when it falls it pushes up more water around it in a circle, and that process of water falling and rising in expanding rings travels away in all directions, like the circles of waves that rocks falling leave in a pond; only it starts with suction near New Zealand. One of the directions it travels is La Jolla. And the winds are often blowing this way, too. They blow on that rising and settling expanding mass for a few days, and the friction of the wind over the disturbed water brings up lines and lines of nice waves.
We always surf in the morning because the wind is quiet. The waves are glassy. We paddle out. We sit for a while and talk. Then I see one coming. The peak is aimed just toward me. I paddle hard to get the board moving. Steve, my friend, offers, “This one’s yours, Mullis.”
Maryjane agrees. “Go for it.”
I paddle. It seems sluggish. It’s been a while. The wave lifts me up, I dig into the water, and with a last stroke, I pull myself over the top and plant my feet on the board. I’m there. The wave is holding me up and at the same time rising up behind me. I’m in control. I can cut to the right or the left as if I were skiing down a long hill. I don’t want to go straight down the front of it. It could come up behind and pitch me over. It’s much more fun to take the sharpest angle I can muster, like a sailboat digging into the wind, feeling the power of the angle and screaming across the face.
When I fall, I hold my breath. The sea takes me into herarms. I’m not bruised. I wait underwater until the action of my board in the whitewater, bouncing around, looking to all the world like it was trying to find my head, is over. Then, I come up.
My friends laugh. They think I’m a bit rusty.
I’ve been away. It’s good to be home.
5
THE REALM OF THE SENSES
M OST OF US agree that we have five senses—five tiny windows—and we are locked in our own huge castle looking out through these five tiny windows. The world outside, we gather, has no limits except this one little one—it has no end to its hugeness or to the minuteness of its details, or to its tangled vines of complexity that coil around themselves from forever in ways that only very young fools would conspire to untangle.
One of our windows is hearing. When the air around our ears goes back and
“Oh.” She laughed reluctantly, without losing the offensive, “But it looks like you’re sleeping.”
My mother is seldom impressed by alternative explanations of her own discoveries. I kept her observation in mind for future reference. She also doesn’t approve of my language, although I explain to her that it is expressive.
Back in San Diego, I thought about what my least favorite image from the trial was. When the verdict was announced and the tired jury was released, the district attorney of Los Angeles County, who had mostly stayed clear of the courtroom, roped all the prosecutors together, and in front of the cameras, they cried. They cried because they had not been able to convict O. J. Simpson.
Did it ever occur to them that the reason we had a trial, the reason we hired them in the first place, is because sometimes the man that the police arrest is innocent? Is it reasonable for a prosecutor to cry when a long-suffering jury comes to a decision and acquits a defendant, who is therefore by our highest standard innocent?
I just hope that I don’t ever get arrested back there.
In La Jolla I live on the beach across from one of the nicest surf breaks in California. Waves are intricate things. Our best waves in La Jolla are born way out in the Pacific when a storm,maybe as far away as New Zealand, a storm with a low pressure area, pulls up a huge convex mass of water from the ocean. It literally sucks it up over a period of days, maybe a few feet above sea level at the center, and the water falls back into the sea, and when it falls it pushes up more water around it in a circle, and that process of water falling and rising in expanding rings travels away in all directions, like the circles of waves that rocks falling leave in a pond; only it starts with suction near New Zealand. One of the directions it travels is La Jolla. And the winds are often blowing this way, too. They blow on that rising and settling expanding mass for a few days, and the friction of the wind over the disturbed water brings up lines and lines of nice waves.
We always surf in the morning because the wind is quiet. The waves are glassy. We paddle out. We sit for a while and talk. Then I see one coming. The peak is aimed just toward me. I paddle hard to get the board moving. Steve, my friend, offers, “This one’s yours, Mullis.”
Maryjane agrees. “Go for it.”
I paddle. It seems sluggish. It’s been a while. The wave lifts me up, I dig into the water, and with a last stroke, I pull myself over the top and plant my feet on the board. I’m there. The wave is holding me up and at the same time rising up behind me. I’m in control. I can cut to the right or the left as if I were skiing down a long hill. I don’t want to go straight down the front of it. It could come up behind and pitch me over. It’s much more fun to take the sharpest angle I can muster, like a sailboat digging into the wind, feeling the power of the angle and screaming across the face.
When I fall, I hold my breath. The sea takes me into herarms. I’m not bruised. I wait underwater until the action of my board in the whitewater, bouncing around, looking to all the world like it was trying to find my head, is over. Then, I come up.
My friends laugh. They think I’m a bit rusty.
I’ve been away. It’s good to be home.
5
THE REALM OF THE SENSES
M OST OF US agree that we have five senses—five tiny windows—and we are locked in our own huge castle looking out through these five tiny windows. The world outside, we gather, has no limits except this one little one—it has no end to its hugeness or to the minuteness of its details, or to its tangled vines of complexity that coil around themselves from forever in ways that only very young fools would conspire to untangle.
One of our windows is hearing. When the air around our ears goes back and
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