“Dr. Mullis to express a keen desire to visit the place where Gregor Mendel worked. His visit – a unique event not only for Masaryk University, but for the entire city of Brno – comprises a great opportunity to honor the world-renowned geneticist as well as his work,” said Jiří Mayer, dean of Faculty of medicine.
In his speech Kary Mullis mentioned history of human knowledge and emphasised a fact that the more knowledge science brings the more questions appear. He added that nothing of value comes without effort. “Remember, most importantly, that the easier something is to learn, the more likely it is to be wrong. If it´s easy to know, it´s someone else´s truth and somebody wants you to know it. If you want to really see under rocks, you have to lift them yourself,” Kary Mullis emphasised.
Kary Mullis is currently working in the Children´s Hospital and Research Institute in Oakland in the United States. He is also a frequent lecturer all over the world and publishes in prestigeous scientific journals. In 1993 he won Nobel Prize for a revolutionary discovery in the field of genetics – the development of PCR (Polymerase Chain Reaction), a technique which facilitates the amplification of specific DNA sequences. The method has multiple applications in medicine, genetics and biotechnology; thanks to its ability to extract DNA from fossils, it has even become the basis of a new scientific discipline – paleobiology.
