Kary Mullis was the 1993 recipient of the Nobel prize in chemistry, for his invention of the PCR, a seminal method of DNA duplication that revolutionized the biochemistry industry and that you probably know as one of the tests widely administered for COVID testing.
Mullis, who passed away in 2019, was a chemistry wizard and highly original thinker who had a very interesting life. He synthesized psychedelics in the 60s during the golden age of experimenting with drugs, before their widespread prohibition and then went on to have a highly successful career as a corporate chemist.
His memoir "Dancing Naked in the Mind Field" is a highly entertaining account of his life up to the late 1990s and details his Nobel-winning invention as well as his life as a corporate hippie: a highly original and creative scientist who also enjoyed the finer things in life.
While by today's revisionist standards he would likely be considered an unadulterated asshole and had a few contrarian and controversial views regarding HIV, climate change as well as astrology that have to be taken with a grain of salt. In his book, he details some of those misguided views and shows that he genuinely cared about the scientific method as an epistemological means to understand the world. He was horribly wrong about a few things and definitely ruffled some feathers, but who has never been wrong about anything?
His account of an encounter with a glowing alien raccoon alone makes it worth checking out.