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At the Inventors Hall of Fame, Kary Mullis' work stands with that of Louis Pasteur and Guglielmo Marconi. Every research university in the country has tens, if not hundreds, of the machines that run on his ideas. Somewhere in Mullis' home is a round medal with a bas-relief of Alfred Nobel, representing the highest honor in science, one shared by the likes of Albert Einstein, James Watson and Francis Crick.

That's because Mullis invented the polymerase chain reaction, or PCR, a technique that makes a billion copies of one tiny gene, thereby allowing scientists to study that gene in great depth. As the historic Human Genome Project pulls into its home stretch, physics passes on to biology the mantle of most revolutionary science. In the last century we conquered the atom; now we will conquer the gene. And we will do it with PCR.

So Mullis must be an august man, writing his memoirs at the National Academy of Sciences, receiving policy makers and reverent fellow scientists in his book-lined study the way Papa Einstein did, right?

No way, dude! Mullis is like hangin' 10 in La Jolla, surfin' every day, brewskies in the fridge, LSD whenever. (Hey, he knows how to make the stuff.) Aliens occasionally visiting. A sexy new wife (since all the women at scientific conferences finally got sick of his lechery). And he just had a book published with his naked bod on the cover. Far out!

Actually, neither of these descriptions is accurate.

But the second one, Mullis as the surfer loon, is the most pervasive. I first heard about it two years ago at a bar during a conference in Southern California. Two geneticists were joking about how they should go find Mullis, do some drugs and score some chicks.

"Isn't he the guy who invented PCR?" I asked, surprised. Usually scientists are more respectful of their best and brightest. They said, yeah, Mullis may have invented PCR, but all those drugs, and all that womanizing, and all those crazy ideas about mind expansion had essentially placed his reputation in the alleyway trash bin, but he was fun to joke about.

When Mullis won the 1993 Nobel Prize in chemistry, journalists reinforced this stark morality tale: Boy genius invents a great thing but then behaves so irresponsibly that everyone laughs him out of science's good graces.

With his own book, "Dancing Naked in the Mind Field," published in 1998, Mullis fumbles the chance to show the world he isn't a fool. His writing is not thoughtful enough to justify his eccentricities, and the book makes him seem the jester people say he is. He writes, among other things: O.J. Simpson was innocent and Marcia Clark's a hottie, humans don't contribute to global warming and HIV is not the cause of AIDS. He purports to have found astral planes by scientific method, he relishes old tales of seducing women and taking drugs and he pooh-poohs current science.

"I'd put 90 percent of our present expenditure for physics and space technology on [finding asteroids that might hit Earth]," he writes. "The other 10 percent should go to looking for aliens." All of this is too challenging to simply glide over; and the lack of deeper explanations makes the man seem facile.

When I tracked down Mullis for an interview (his first for a major magazine in almost two years), I was primed to get some of those juicy "No way, dude; let's do some LSD!" quotations to jazz up my profile. Of course, character being different from caricature, I didn't get any.

During our hour-long phone conversation, Mullis spoke nothing like the bar-stool imitations of him I have heard scientists do. He has a soft voice that retains the diphthongal calm of his native South Carolina. It is indeed a good voice for a successful womanizer, but I was struck more by his consideration in answering my questions. His speech had none of the silly jumpiness of his book. I asked him why so many scientists dislike him.

"I'm not driven by being understood," he told me without raising his voice. "I don't try to be contrary, either. If I say, 'Hey, there's no reason to think that human beings have any long-term control over the weather,' I am telling you what I know. No one contradicts me honestly; they just shout because they dislike what I say."

He means what he says; it's important to him. He has ideas that belong on astral planes. But there is also passion -- the energy of a wide-ranging mind that disregards barriers of inquiry most of us heed. And there is hurt for being laughed at by the same scientists who have built their careers on PCR, the invention he gave them.

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