Scientist, surfer dude and LSD aficionado who won a Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his work on DNA
Kary Mullis
Animation artist who won two Oscars for his brilliant drawings in the film Who Framed Roger Rabbit
Richard Williams
R
ICHARD WILLIAMS, who has died
aged 86, was a legendary figure in
the field of hand-drawn animation
whose name will be most closely
linked with two projects, one polished to a
superlative degree, the other notoriously
uncompleted. Taken collectively, they
illustrate the rewards and risks of the many
painstaking hours Williams spent hunched
over the drawing board.
In the mid-1980s, the greying Williams
was appointed as animation director on
Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988), Disney’s
wildly ambitious hybrid of cartoon and
human characters. Shepherding the
pop-eyed, leporine Roger through a
combination of real and virtual locations,
Williams arrived at something both
multidimensional and vastly more dynamic
than the flat animated landscapes of old.
The attention to detail – at all points
matching Roger’s eye line to that of Bob
Hoskins’s flesh-and-blood private
investigator – paid off spectacularly: having
accumulated blockbuster box office, the
film earned Williams two Academy Awards
at the 1989 ceremony, one (for Best Visual
Effects) shared, the other an individual
Special Achievement award.
Philip French in The Observer hailed
Roger Rabbit as a “milestone in the history
of animation”, praising the “breathtaking”
technical virtuosity of the drawings by
Williams and his team of British artist-
draughtsmen.
The film’s success tempted Warner Bros
to funnel funds into The Thief and the
Cobbler, an immersive folktale which the
animator had started working on in 1964
with an eye to creating the greatest
animated film ever made.
Yet production was slow going even by
animation standards, and by 1992, with the
resurgent Disney’s vaguely similar Aladdin
looming, the plug was pulled on Williams’s
endeavours. Existing footage was then recut
and issued twice by impatient producers
keen to get some return on their
investment: first as The Princess and the
Cobbler (1993), then – when rights reverted
to Harvey Weinstein’s Miramax – as Arabian
Knight (1995).
Neither cut found much of an audience,
and whatever greatness lay in Williams’s
original vision appeared to have been lost
forever. Understandably bruised, he refused
to watch either of the commercially
available versions, reasoning: “My son ...
told me that if I ever want to jump off a
bridge, I should take a look.”
Yet Williams’s own pencil-test workprint
of Thief eventually appeared online, leading
fans to assemble what became known as the“Recobbled Cut”, preserving those surreal,
shimmering flourishes hacked from earlier
variations. In recent years, Williams toured
the world with this version, sharing what he
had taken from this long, troubled process.
He was born Richard Edmund Williams
in Toronto on March 19 1933, the son of
Kenneth and Kathleen Williams (née Bell),
an illustrator who had once been offered a
job at Disney. “She took me to see Snow
White when I was five and said that I was
never the same again,” Williams recalled in
a 2013 interview. “Not that I was scared like
all the other children who thought the
creatures were real. I knew they were
drawings, and that’s what fascinated me.”A keen scribbler, he visited the Disney
studios when he was 14: “I was a clever little
fellow, so I took my drawings and I
eventually got in ... I was in there for two
days.” After art school, he headed to Ibiza in
1953 with the ambition of making it as a
painter; soon, however, he found “the
paintings were trying to move”.
He relocated to London in 1955 and found
work in various animation studios,
including those of the emergent Bob
Godfrey: “I worked in the basement and
would do work in kind, and he would let me
use the camera ... [it was] a barter system.”
That Williams was deviating from the
Disney norm became evident from his early
shorts. The Little Island (1958), which won
the Bafta for Best Animated Film, was a
half-hour allegory in which three figures
representing truth, beauty and goodness
jostle for supremacy. Subsequent
productions – notably The Wardrobe in 1958,
A Lecture on Man and Love Me, Love Me,
Love Me in 1962 – confirmed his rising
status.
Williams’s early work on Thief was
funded by a new revenue stream: providing
title sequences and animated inserts for
big-budget features. As London was
swinging, he contributed graphics to What’s
New, Pussycat? (1965), A Funny Thing
Happened on the Way to the Forum (1966),
Casino Royale (1967) and, most prominently,The Charge of the Light Brigade (1968), for
which he rendered warring national forces
in satirical penstrokes.
His company, Richard Williams
Productions, bolstered by older animators
laid off by cost-cutting studios, enjoyed an
early triumph with their 25-minute
adaptation of A Christmas Carol (1971),
winner of the 1972 Oscar for Best Animated
Short.
In 1975 his witty animated credits for the
The Return of the Pink Panther (working
with his mentor, the veteran American
animator Ken Harris), were “enough to
make what comes after seem like
anticlimax”, commented one critic.
Less successful was the feature-length
Raggedy-Ann & Andy: A Musical Adventure
(1977), which Williams took on only after the
original director Abe Levitow died,
whereupon he underwent several draining
creative clashes with the studio, Fox: “The
lesson I learnt was the Golden Rule –
whoever has the gold makes the rule.”
Yet he won an Emmy in 1982 for Zigg y’s
Gift, a Christmas television special based on
a newspaper comic strip; and he crafted
memorable work in the commercial sector,
animating Tony the Tiger and the Cresta
Bear, among other icons of the advertising
world.
He won the Winsor McCay award, named
after a previous animation pioneer, in 1984,
and alongside his fourth wife, the producer
Imogen “Mo” Sutton, received another
Oscar nod in 2016 for Prologue, a
mesmerising study of Spartan and Athenian
warriors, based on an idea he had had as a
15-year-old. (Its working title, according to
the octogenarian Williams, was “Will I Live
to Finish This?”)
By that time, he had become an
avuncular elder statesman, assembling The
Animators’ Survival Kit, a do-it-yourself
guide published in 2001 and later
reconfigured as an iPad app.
Working out of Aardman Animation’s
Bristol studios, he embraced Twitter,
offering real-time mentoring, while
reflecting on his legacy: “If I did things
again, I would be wiser, but you get wise
too late. I was so interested in the work that
it blinded me to what was going on. And the
work is just so damn fascinating you feel as
if nothing else matters.”
He is survived by his wife and, from his
three previous marriages, six children
including the animators Claire and Alex
Williams, and the painter Holly Williams-
Brock.Richard Williams, born March 19 1933,
died August 16 2019Williams at work and, below, Roger Rabbit getting to grips with Bob Hoskins as Jessica Rabbit looks onALAMY/ DICK DARRELL/TORONTO STAR VIA GETTY IMAGESK
ARY MULLIS, who has died
aged 74, shared the 1993 Nobel
Prize in Chemistry for his
invention of a technique called
polymerase chain reaction, or
PCR, that allows scientists to
amplify a single DNA molecule; but science
was just one of his interests, competing
with surfing, psychedelic drugs, astrology
and women.
PCR harnesses the cell’s natural
mechanism for replicating its DNA, a
process that occurs every time a cell
divides, and focuses the copying process on
a particular gene sequence of interest. The
copies are then copied, leading to an
exponential chain reaction. The technique
has been described as one of the most
important scientific inventions of the 20th
century – an essential tool for biologists,
clinical diagnosticians, forensic scientists
and almost anyone else who studies genetic
material. A single hair root, or a microscopic
blood stain left at a crime scene, for
example, contains ample DNA for PCR.
Before the mid 1980s, molecular
biologists had to use laborious, time-
consuming methods to identify, clone, and
isolate pieces of DNA before studying them.
With PCR, performed with chemicals in a
test tube, the job takes a few hours.
Mullis liked to relate how the concept
came to him in May 1983 during a night-
time drive with a girlfriend along the road
between Cloverdale and Boonville in
Mendocino County, California, to his cabin
in Anderson Valley: “I was functionally
sober ... but it was late at night and I was
feeling weird ...
“The California buckeyes poked heavy
blossoms out ... The pink and white stalks
hanging down into my headlights looked
cold, but they were loaded with warmed
oils that dominated the dimension of smell.
It seemed to be the night of the buckeyes,
but something else was stirring.”
Mullis’s mind wandered back to his job as
a chemist with the Cetus Corporation. He
was thinking about human DNA –
specifically how to replicate human DNA.
And it was at “mile marker 46.7 on Highway
128” that he experienced his “eureka”
moment. Before he reached his destination,
Mullis recalled, he was already entertaining
thoughts of a Nobel Prize.
The prize came 10 years later. But by then
Mullis had dropped out of full-time science.
The morning the Nobel committee
announced the award, he was drunk and, in
response to the news, decided to go surfing
near his La Jolla apartment. As camera
crews pursued, he got another surfer dude
to play his role. “It’s like a dream come
true”, the ersatz Mullis was quoted as
saying. By the time the real Mullis had dried
off and sobered up, the paparazzi were
laying siege to his home: “As it turned out,
none of the other Nobel laureates that year
were serious about surfing, and ‘Surfer
Wins Nobel Prize’ made headlines.”
Mullis went on to earn his living by
consulting and lecturing on an agenda
seemingly selected with an eye to shock
value – as was evident in a lecture he gavein 1994 at a medical society conference in
Toledo, Spain. “Just before the lecture, he
told me he would not speak about the PCR
but would tell his ideas about Aids not
being caused by the HIV virus,’’ the
ambushed president of the society, Dr John
Martin, recalled in a letter to
Nature. “His only slides ...
were photographs he had
taken of naked women with
coloured lights projected on
their bodies. He accused
science of being universally
corrupt with widespread
falsification of data to obtain
grants. Finally he impugned
the honesty of several
named scientists working in
the HIV field.’’
Some former colleagues at
Cetus, meanwhile,
questioned the claim that
Mullis was solely responsible
for PCR. “Mullis as an
experimentalist is sort of hit
and miss,’’ explained Dr Tom
White, the friend who got him a job at Cetus
and supervised much of his PCR research.
“He got a lot of data but ... tended to do
uncontrolled experiments, so it wasn’t very
convincing when he did get a result.’’
Even after a year, Mullis had not
developed definitive proof of his concept,
so White then enlisted another scientist,
Randall Saiki, who produced data that
convinced everyone at Cetus that the
process worked. Meanwhile, a plan to have
Mullis write the first paper describing thetheory of PCR came to nothing because
Mullis whiled away the summer creating
fractal pictures on Cetus’s computers. By
default, a paper describing the technique’s
applicability as a test for sickle-cell anaemia
was sent to Science in late 1985, with Mullis
in the middle of seven
co-authors, to protect a
patent application. Mullis’s
own paper describing his
original PCR concept was
then rejected by the journals
Nature and Science on the
ground that it was not new.
A furious squabble over
credit for the discovery
ensued, with the result that
Mullis, to the relief of some,
left the company in 1986.
None the less, when the
sequence of events was
carefully sifted through by
the Nobel committee, the
award for the discovery of
PCR was to Mullis alone.
Kary Banks Mullis was
born on December 28 1944 in Lenoir, North
Carolina, and grew up in South Carolina,
where his father was a furniture salesman
and his mother an estate agent.
He showed a keen interest in science at a
young age, recalling how, at school, “before
we became interested in the maturing
young women around us ... we blasted a
frog a mile into the air and got him back
alive.”
As an undergraduate chemistry student
at the Georgia Institute of Technology,Mullis claimed to have invented an
electronic device that could control a light
switch with brain waves. He went on to do a
doctorate in biochemistry at the University
of California, Berkeley, where, this being
the 1960s, his interest in hallucinogens
blossomed. One LSD trip inspired a paper
on time travel, “The Cosmological
Significance of Time Reversal”, which was
subsequently published in Nature.
After completing his doctorate, however,
Mullis dropped out to write novels and
later, for about two years, worked at a
bakery.
It was his friend, Tom White, who lured
him back to science, first with a job at the
University of California, San Francisco,
then, from 1979, at Cetus Corporation,
Emeryville, one of the world’s first biotech
start-ups.
After leaving Cetus he worked for two
years at the biotechnology company
Xytronyx in San Diego, before becoming a
freelance consultant and lecturer.
In 1999 he published a book of essays
about his life, Dancing Naked in the Mind
Field, in which he claimed to have
addressed the Empress of Japan as
“sweetie’’ when awarded the Japan prize in
1993, and described how he was nearly
arrested when he went to Stockholm for his
Nobel Prize, for playing a laser beam from
his hotel room at passers-by.
He also claimed to have been rescued
from a fatal accident by a person travelling
in an astral plane, and to have conversed
with an alien disguised as a raccoon: “ ‘Good
evening, doctor,’ it said. I said something
back, I don’t remember what – probably,
‘Hello’. ”
Mullis once described himself as a
“specialist in non-specialism” and claimed
to be willing to give lectures on anything:
“Just give me an hour on an airplane with
some magazines.”
He relished physical as much as
intellectual risks. One friend recalled seeing
him in Aspen skiing down the centre of an
icy road through fast two-way traffic:
“Mullis had a vision that he would die by
crashing his head against a redwood tree.
Hence he is fearless wherever there are no
redwoods.’’
His chief participation in the PCR
industry in later life was through a
company he founded to amplify gene-
snippets from the hair of the dead and
famous and encase the blobs in jewellery.
In 1995 he had been expected, as a DNA
expert, to testify in court on behalf of OJ
Simpson, the former football star accused of
killing his ex-wife and her friend, until the
defence team decided that the prosecution
would have a field day with Mullis’s
experimental drug use (he once collapsed
after inhaling nitrous oxide and woke up
with a severe case of frostbite on his face),
and dropped him as a witness.
Mullis is survived by his fourth wife,
Nancy, and by two sons and a daughter
from earlier marriages.Kary Mullis, born December 28 1944, died
August 7 2019Mullis, on the day he won the prize, explaining the ‘polymerase chain reaction’ which he inventedCARLOS SCHIEBECK/AFP/GETTYF
RED WHEELER, who
has died aged 100,
survived 60 bombing
operations as a wireless
operator and air gunner and
was awarded the DFM.
At the outbreak of the
war, the 20-year old
Wheeler lost no time in
volunteering for aircrew
duties in the RAF. After
completing his training he
joined 214 Squadron at
Stradishall in Suffolk and
flew his first operation, to
Bremen, on March 12 1941.
Returning from a raid on
Lorient in France, his
Wellington was badly
damaged and all electrical
supplies were lost, including
the navigation equipment.
Running short of fuel, the
pilot was forced to crash-
land in a field. Not knowing
where they were, the crew
were relieved to hear an
English voice call out: “Are
you OK, chaps?”
By the end of July,
Wheeler and his crew had
completed 28 operations
with just two more to fly
before being rested. To their
surprise, they were told that
“as the most experienced
crew in the squadron” they
had been selected to fly a
specially modified
Wellington capable of
carrying the new 4,000lb
bomb; their target was
Berlin. They found the
target, released the bomb
and made the long flight
back over enemy territory,
landing after an eight-hour
flight.
Four days later they
bombed Mannheim and
completed their tour of
operations. Wheeler left the
squadron to be an instructor
at a bomber-training unit.
Frederick James Wheeler
was born on April 29 1919
and educated at the Royal
Masonic School, Bushey
Park. At his training unit at
Moreton-in-Marsh, Wheeler
flew with crews who had
recently completed their
initial flying training. He
commented on some of the
hazards for an instructor:
“There we trained ‘sprog’
wireless operators flying
with ‘sprog’ pilots on their
first solos, which was often
scary!”
During his time as an
instructor he flew on three
of the first “One Thousand”
bomber raids when
experienced instructors at
the training units were used
to supplement the main
bomber force.
Wheeler returned to
operations in April 1944
when he joined the newly
formed 578 Squadron
(RAAF) based in Yorkshire
and flying the four-engined
Halifax. Initially, many ofthe targets were in northern
France in support of the
build-up to the Normandy
invasion. He flew his first
operation on May 1 1944 to
Malines, and over the next
few weeks attacked V-1
rocket launch sites and road
and rail communications.
During this period, his
pilot was frequently unfit to
fly so Wheeler volunteered
to fly with other crews who
were short of a wireless
operator. On August 12,
when Wheeler flew his 60th
and final operation to bomb
Rüsselsheim, a Focke-Wulf
190 fighter attacked his
Halifax but was fought off
by the two air gunners.
Two days later his CO
informed him that he had
been awarded the DFM and
a commission. The citation
commented on his
“outstanding ability and
enthusiasm”.
He became an instructor
at a heavy bomber-training
unit, and after the armistice
he flew on “Cook’s Tours”,
when the bombers took
ground crew on flights to
see the damage caused by
the bombing campaign. “It
was terrible to see the awful
damage to the cities,” he
recalled. “Especially I
remember Cologne,
completely destroyed,
except for the cathedral
which looked unscathed.”
During his last year of
service he took a postal
course in surveying, and
after leaving the RAF he
spent 32 years as a surveyor
for the electricity supply
industry. He covered the
whole of East Anglia and
attributed his long life to a
working career spent mostly
outdoors.
He sang in a local choir
well into his nineties and
travelled 20 miles each
week to do his shopping
until a year before his death.
Fred Wheeler’s wife
Gwen died in 1999, and their
son survives him.Fred Wheeler, born April
29 1919, died August 10
2019Fred Wheeler
Wireless operator who made 60
bombing missions over Europe
Shocked by damage to CologneObituaries
The Daily Telegraph Tuesday 20 August 2019 *** 25
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