Dancing Naked in the Mind Field, by Kary Mullis (Bloomsbury, £12.99 in UK)

Kary Mullis is a Renaissance man for the new millennium; a brilliant chemist who was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1993 for his invention of the polymerase chain reaction (PCR). If you don't know what that is, then you should be reading this book. ("Natural DNA is a tractless coil," Mullis begins his explanation of the PCR discovery, "like an unwound and tangled audio tape on the floor of the car in the dark.") Mullis is more than a brilliant chemist, however - he is an enthusiastic surfer (of the wet, not the web, variety), an unrepentant iconoclast who has clashed with the scientific establishment over everything from his enthusiastic use of LSD for research purposes to his doubts about links between the HIV virus and AIDS. He is almost certainly the only scientist in the Western world who is not only convinced that he experienced an alien abduction, but is prepared to write about it in broad daylight. Oh, and he writes like a dream. This is science for people who find science impossible to swallow.