by David Suzuki
The Zoology Department at the University of Chicago had had a long and distinguished record in the classical fields, whereas cell biology and genetics were relatively recent arrivals. Aaron Moscona was a top developmental biologist there, and Hewson Swift was a cell biologist with expertise with the electron microscope. Bill Baker was the geneticist. As well, there were terrific people in other departments such as botany, microbiology, and biochemistry, and there was an atmosphere of intellectual excitement. I took courses with two of the “grand old men of ecology,” Alfred Emerson and Tom Park,
both of whom gave me a grounding in ecology and introduced me to students in the area.
But exhilaration about the recognition that deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA), was the genetic material, the James Watson–Francis Crick model that explained it, and other advances in molecular biology seemed to extend into every area of the life sciences. I remember Tom Humphreys, one of the bright grad students in Moscona's lab, protesting, “You geneticists seem to want to take over all of biology.” He was right—we did. As far as we were concerned, the entire field of developmental biology was the consequence of differential activation and inactivation of genes. We grad students in genetics were pretty puffed up with ourselves as a result of the recent discoveries and tended to be condescending toward the more traditional, descriptive sciences. Now that I realize how important it is to bring an ecological perspective to environmental issues, I feel a need to serve penance for my youthful arrogance.
In June 1961, I received my PhD and had the added thrill of receiving the sheepskin directly from the university's new president, George Beadle. He was a Nobel Prize winner who had begun his career working with corn, then switched to fruit flies, and finally settled on the bread mold, Neurospora crassa. Through this research, he and Edward Tatum had discovered the one-gene/one-enzyme relationship that suggested each gene specified the production of a specific protein or enzyme. I became a fully licensed scientist upon receiving my degree from an eminent fellow geneticist.
My thesis adviser, Bill Baker, had worked for years at the Biology Division of the Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) in Tennessee and strongly recommended that I apply for a position there. I did, and I was delighted to receive my first full-time job as a research associate in the lab of Dan Lindsley, one of the world's experts in manipulating chromosomes.
ORNL had been created in the mountains of Tennessee as a top-secret project to purify uranium for the Manhattan Project, set up in 1942 to develop the atomic bomb. After the war, research on radiation continued in the Biology Division, but by the time I applied, the division had shifted its research emphasis to basic biology. Once there, I was free to follow any avenue of research I wanted in the company of some of the best scientists in the world. There was a wonderful spirit of collegiality and helpfulness that encouraged cooperation and exchange of ideas as the best way to develop one's skills. I came away much more confident in my abilities as a scientist.
Yataro Tazima (right), a silkworm geneticist from Japan, visiting Dan Lindsley and me at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee
World War II had created Oak Ridge, and, ironically, the institution that had been the source of material for the bombs that had demolished Hiroshima and Nagasaki was now a hotbed of world-class research and international cooperation, and I was part of it. There was another legacy, from the Great Depression of the 1930s. Tennessee had been one of the poorest regions of the U.S.; the forests had been cut down long before, and farmers had overworked the soil, leading to loss of the land's fertility and to erosion. During the Depression, U.S. president Franklin D. Roosevelt had galvanized people with his vision of a New Deal to create wealth and get people working. At his urging, Congress established the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) in 1933 to oversee a massive make-work project. The TVA was a radically new approach that took a more holistic view of problems like malaria control, flooding, deforestation, navigation, and erosion. A network of lakes created by dams provided flood control and, most important, power for industries and home use.
Around Oak Ridge, there were TVA dams that supported populations of fish. Below the dams, I would fish for trout and shad, and above in the lakes, silver bass were plentiful. I would take the family camping in the Smoky Mountains. Dad came to visit and was soon driving along back hills, meeting hillbillies and sharing their moonshine.
But Tennessee had been a slave-owning state and a part of the southern Confederacy in the Civil War. There were still overt signs of racism. Because of my own experience during World War II, I identified strongly with the black community. Most of the scientists at ORNL came from the North, so the facilities were an oasis of liberalism. In Dan Lindsley's lab, the chief technician was Ruby Wilkerson, an African American who lived with her husband, Floyd, in the nearby village of Philadelphia. Ruby and I would sit at our microscopes across from each other, and she would regale me with stories about the many geneticists who had gone through Lindsley's lab.
When Joane and I visited Ruby and her family, guests sat at the table with the men while the hosting women stood behind and filled our plates and glasses as needed. The TV was always blaring. Once I was holding forth when I suddenly realized that no one was listening to me—they were all riveted by the appearance of a black actor on the TV screen. It was a stunning illustration of their desperate need for someone with whom they could identify.
There were lots of black employees at ORNL, including Ruby's husband and his brother, but almost all worked in support positions—as janitors, kitchen help, and animal caretakers. I became involved in the local chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and, in empathizing with the problems of discrimination in the South, began to resent all white people. Joane and I traveled into the Deep South, where I was distressed by the blatant racism in signs restricting the use of drinking fountains and washrooms.
My Oak Ridge lab companion, Ruby Wilkerson; her husband, Floyd; and her daughter,
Patricia with trout at Dad's pond near London
Although I could have stayed on at Oak Ridge and had been offered several faculty positions in the U.S., I felt deeply estranged from the culture because of the overt racism. Even though Canada had invoked the War Measures Act against Japanese Canadians, the country was smaller, and I believed there was more of a chance to work for a better society. The opportunities for a scientist in the U.S. were much greater at that time, but I have never regretted my decision to return home.
A position as assistant professor arose in the Genetics Department at the University of Alberta, which I eagerly applied for, and I was gratified to be offered the job. I accepted it. Edmonton was an excellent place to begin my career, although I took a cut in pay compared with what I would have received had I stayed at ORNL. The province was booming and provided far more support for research and staff than most universities received. When I arrived in the summer of 1962, I would leave the lab at 2:00 or 3:00 in the morning and was thrilled that it was still light out because of Edmonton's northerly latitude. I was not so happy when I was assigned to teach an Introductory Genetics course to a group of agriculture students, but they turned out to be the hardest-working and hardest-playing group I've ever had.
However, that winter, the thermometer plunged to minus forty degrees Fahrenheit, a temperature I had never experienced and did not wish to experience again. So when a position came up at the University of British Columbia (UBC), I applied and was invited out for an interview. When I left Edmonton to try for the job, the temperature was minus thirty degrees. I arrived in Vancouver, where it was thirty above, and everyone was moaning about the cold! I took the job but also another pay cut. It was a good thing I stayed at UBC, because at the rate I was going, I might have ended up having to pay for a job.
When I had taken up the position in Edmonton in 1962, I applied for a research grant from the National Research Council (NRC) in Ottawa and was shocked to be awarded only $4,200. I was told later that a f
irst-time grant for a new professor was $3,500, but since I'd had a year of postdoctoral studies, mine had been bigger. It was a shock because, at that time, the people with whom I had graduated in the U.S. were receiving first-time grants of $30,000 to $40,000. Canada had simply not moved into the post-Sputnik era, as the U.S. had, with a huge commitment to science as part of the Cold War competition.
Canada's granting policies had grown up when there was far less research money to support a small community of poorly paid scientists who did research simply because they loved it. In Canada, one aged into respectability—the longer one hung in doing research, the bigger the grants became. When I returned to Canada in 1962, heads of departments often held the really big grants, even though they were usually fully occupied with administrative duties. They were powerful because of the money they controlled and the people they could support and hire.
That has slowly changed. In those early days in Canada, University of Toronto microbial geneticist Lou Siminovitch worked hard to get better support for junior scientists. He attracted a top-notch group of young people to the University of Toronto, and I believe his advocacy of better support for such researchers was part of the reason my own grants began to rise as the lab became productive. Lou recognized that Drosophila (fruit fly) genetics would be an important area of molecular interest and offered me a position at the University of Toronto that would have led to increased grants and support. But I really loved British Columbia and couldn't see living in a large city.
Canada did have Nobel laureates in science, the most famous being Frederick Banting and John Macleod in 1923 for their discovery of insulin. It was the Nobel Prizes awarded to University of Toronto chemist John Polanyi in 1986 and UBC DNA chemist Michael Smith in 1993 that galvanized greater support for research. In 1972, the Senate Special Committee on Science Policy headed by Senator Maurice Lamontagne had released its recommendations, and among them was greater emphasis on “mission-oriented research”—that is, research dedicated to a specific goal.
The problem with that approach is that science does not proceed from experiment A to experiment B to C to D to a cure for cancer. If it did, we would have solved most of the problems of the world by now. Science cannot proceed in this linear manner. From the moment we begin experiment A, we have no idea what the results will be or where we will end up. The way we maximize “return on our investment” is by supporting top people, not top research proposals. Increasingly, universities are encouraging arrangements in which academics are supported by money from the private sector—in forestry, agriculture, pharmacy, biotechnology, and so on. This policy has had a negative effect on the open, free flow of discussion, criticism, and information that is the essence of a university community.
At the very beginning of my career, I was ambitious and determined to make a mark, not to make money or acquire power but mainly to receive the approbation of the scientists I most admired in Drosophila genetics. But I simply would not have been able to carve out a career on such a piddling grant as $4,200 from the National Research Council, and I reluctantly began to make inquiries about positions back in the U.S.
Then the picture changed. As I was leaving Oak Ridge in 1962, George Stapleton, an administrator I had come to know, had advised me to apply to the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission (USAEC) for research money. Once I got to the University of Alberta, I applied to USAEC, but I did not expect to receive any money, because I was doing basic genetics that did not involve radiation in any way. To my surprise and delight, I received a substantial grant, about ten times my NRC grant and certainly enough to get my lab off the ground. It is such an irony that the U.S. gave me, a foreigner, the support that enabled me to remain in my own country.
I had worked day and night at ORNL, and there were always other people around working just as hard. When I took my academic position in Canada, I was confident in my abilities as a teacher and scientist and anxious to make a name in research, so I continued to work in the lab into the evenings and on weekends. Students responded to this example and worked right along with me, so the lab was lit up well after my colleagues and other students in the department had gone home.
I was still in my late twenties when I arrived at UBC in 1963. Faculty members in the Zoology Department wore jackets and ties, and their students addressed them as “Doctor.” I certainly did not wear a jacket and tie, and my students called me by my first name. This more “American” style was frowned upon. I was never caught up in the social sphere with other staff either, because I was so enthralled with setting up my own lab and getting our research off the ground. The Canadian faculty still acted like a small, exclusive club. I felt disgusted at a meeting when another professor boasted that we were one of the best zoology departments in Canada. I was only interested in being among the best in the world.
Evenings were the best time to be in the lab. No one, including me, had classes then, so we could count fruit flies, drink coffee, and talk—my, how we talked, mostly about genetics but also about sex, politics, and the world. With the revolution in molecular biology, we were all agog at what was being found and kept hatching crazy ideas for experiments. The students I attracted were enthusiastic, and the lab became a kind of family. We worked hard, but we also played hard, going to the pub, skateboarding in the basement, camping together on weekends and in the summers.
Harvesting salmon pituitary glands for future Nobel Prize winner Michael Smith's biochemical studies (yup, I used to smoke)
But the self-sufficiency of my lab, our enthusiasm, and no doubt our arrogance, set us apart from the rest of the department. We looked down our noses at the folks in fisheries and wildlife biology, snorting that they were just descriptive biologists, not real experimental scientists like us. I cringe when I think back on that cockiness and sense of superiority. Yes, that feeling of excitement about our work created a strong sense of community, but it also alienated me from most of my fellow faculty members. Confident in my teaching and research and absorbed in my own community of students, I had little interest in the local politics of academia and lived in a kind of self-imposed isolation from the rest of the university. If they didn't bother me, I was happy to be left alone.
Not surprisingly, as I spent more and more time in the lab, Joane and I had less and less time together. Besides Tamiko we now had Troy, born in 1962; dinner, bathing the children, reading to them in bed—that was a steady part of my routine before going back to the lab. But even on our family camping trips, the lab often went along. Joane had every justification for demanding more of my company. She had worked hard so that I could go to graduate school even with a child, and once I was settled as a faculty member, we should have had more opportunities to be together. But I was too ambitious to give up the time; I was much more focused on doing a really elegant, important experiment. Our marriage was ending. Soon after the birth of Laura, our third child, in 1964, Joane and the children moved into a home we had just bought. I did not.
On April 4, 1968, American civil-rights leader Martin Luther King was assassinated, and students at UBC organized a rally on the steps of the library to express our sorrow. I was an associate professor and spoke out, telling British Columbians that this was a time for us not to smugly reaffirm our sense of superiority over Americans but to reexamine our own society. I reminded them of the incarceration of Japanese Canadians during World War II, the treatment of Native people, and the fact that Asians and blacks were not allowed to vote in B.C. until the 1960s. The Vancouver Sun wrote a scathing editorial that chastised me for opening old wounds, for raising issues that were not relevant on the occasion of a King memorial. It was then that I realized how important tenure was as I was subtly informed that university administrators were nervous about faculty members who might attract negative publicity.
When Joane and I had separated in 1964, my department head warned me that a broken marriage could jeopardize my career. A faculty member from Microbiology drove me home from campus one evening, and as I was about to
get out of the car, he said, “I would be remiss if I didn't say that by breaking up your marriage, you will pay a price within the university.”
On many fronts, the university was still adjusting to rapidly changing values in society.
WHEN I HAD RETURNED to Canada from the U.S., I had been consumed by a passion to study cell division in Drosophila and thought I had some clever tricks up my sleeve. But I also enjoyed teaching and put a lot of time and energy into it. My early years of public-speaking contests and courses paid off in my abilities as a “performer.” I encouraged students to interrupt me at any time if they were confused or had a query.
Students were interested in far more than how many points an exam was worth or what would or would not be on the final test paper; they wanted to explore the implications of the work I was discussing—societal issues related to genetic engineering, cloning, and eugenics—so I was forced to read up on the history of genetics, which I hadn't been taught in college. It was devastating to me to discover that geneticists early in the twentieth century had extrapolated from their studies of the heredity of physical characteristics in mice, fruit flies, and plants to make pronouncements about the heredity of intelligence and behavior in humans. Back then, genetics was an exciting new science making huge inroads in our understanding of the mechanisms of heredity, and no doubt seemed to them as if we were on the threshold of acquiring incredible powers to manipulate human heredity. But these grand claims ended up in discriminatory legislation prohibiting interracial marriage in some U.S. states, restricting immigration of certain ethnic groups, and permitting sterilization of inmates in mental institutions for genetic reasons. It was a shock to discover that the grandiose declarations of geneticists had been used in Canada to justify the fears of treachery from Japanese Canadians that led to our evacuation and incarceration, and in Nazi Germany to support the Race Purification Laws that culminated in the Holocaust.