Kary Mullis, Nobel Laureate and biochemist, died on August 7th, 2019 in California at the age of 74. Mullis was born in Lenoir, North Carolina in 1944 to parents Ray and Jewel. He studied biochemistry under Nobel Laureate Melvin Calvin at the University of California, Berkeley and was awarded his Ph.D. in 1973. Mullis made a number of groundbreaking contributions to the field of biochemistry, most notably inventing the Polymerase Chain Reaction (PCR) technique for amplifying strands of DNA, for which he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1993. Mullis authored three books, “Dancing Naked in the Mind Field”, “Taq DNA Polymerase”, and “The Human Front Line in the War Against Global Warming”, which explored science and ecology. He also served as Chief Scientific Officer of the biotechnology company XCLOMED, and was an avid surfer, skier and raconteur. Mullis will be remembered as an innovative scientist who made tremendous contributions to the field of biochemistry and worked throughout his life to further scientific knowledge and advance human understanding of the natural world.