"But I went out and achieved anyway!"

My friend the Mouse Asthmatologist brings up a very interesting point in his latest blog posting. One that I will need to dig into and report back on later. But for now, I have something that's fairly loosely related. Something, that once I do the aforementioned digging and do the aforementioned reporting, should, in a circuitous fashion, make sense.
At any rate, for now...

So, I was recently doing a little backgrounding into the history of the PCR for a lab presentation and was a little shocked and very amused at what I found. For those of you in science, this is a probably an integral part of your daily lives. For those of you not in science--as creatures of our modern day society--you will no doubt be able to find a link to it as well. In a nutshell, it's a process by which small amounts of DNA can be repeated and amplified into millions, even billions of copies. It is, for all practical purposes, what has changed the face of pretty much any science in the last 20 years. From Forensics and Genetic Fingerprinting (ever seen an episode of CSI?), to parental testing, Archeology, Paleontology, to any and all medical/biological research. And THIS GUY is apparently the brains behind it. That's all well and good, but the part that got me was his admission (and now I'm paraphrasing here) that if it hadn't been for the LSD...
Heh-heh. I'll repeat that.

If it hadn't been for the LSD, Kary Mullis may never have conceived of the PCR. Yeah. Wha?
As I poked around a little more I found this article which actually lists several famous "Stoned Scientists," from Stephen Jay Gould and famous naturopath Andrew Weil to Sigmund Freud and, of course, Timothy Leary and the awards they went on to achieve. Mr. Mullis went on to win the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1993.
He's also written an autobiography that will most likely end up on my Amazon.com Wish List.

So, no, it's not like brilliant minds and their ground-breaking triumphs in association with drug use is a new phenomena. And I'm in no way condoning the use of illegal substances. I'm just, quite honestly, flabbergasted. And fascinated.
But that shouldn't and doesn't surprise me. I hadn't really given it much thought. (See last posting's small hometown and college references. A little green and naive, perhaps?)
I'm just amazed at what leaps and bounds (not to mention how much easier my life is--or IS it?-- because of the technology) can be made at the hands of the human mind and the alteration thereof.
I realize that's a pretty dodgy statement. But it's certainly something to think about. And who knows? Who will be the next Giant in Science and what will he or she discover and will or won't drugs be involved?

Because you know what that means.....