David Suzuki

by David Suzuki

  I decided I had to speak out about the potential abuse of genetics. For my colleagues in that field, this did not sit well, especially as revolutionary insights and techniques for manipulating DNA seemed to presage a cornucopia of wonderful applications. I kept trying to remind geneticists of the disastrous consequences that had resulted from claims made by equally eminent geneticists only two generations before. It has been a lonely role for a geneticist to raise issues of concern when there was and is so much enthusiasm and so much apparent potential for revolutionary applications.

  In 1991, I was invited to host an eight-part series of one-hour television shows on the genetic revolution, in a coproduction between the American PBS and the British BBC networks. In Britain, the series was called Cracking the Code, in the U.S., it was The Secret of Life, and it was broadcast in 1993. It was a huge success for nonprofit PBS, earning a review in Newsweek magazine that said the series was the “first sign of intelligent life in the television season.” Because of the success of the series, I was asked to be the moderator of an all-day symposium in Oklahoma City in April 1995, only two weeks before the tragic bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building by an antigovernment extremist that killed 168 people.

  The symposium participants were eminent geneticists discussing the exciting implications of their work, and the star of the meeting was Nobel laureate James Watson, co-discoverer with Francis Crick of the double helix. I was effusive in my introduction of Watson, talking about how few scientists were as successful as he was, living to see their work become the stuff of textbooks, blah, blah. When I called for questions after his talk, people were shy at first, so I took the initiative and asked Watson what I thought was an innocuous question about the social and ethical implications of the revolutionary techniques in molecular biology. To my astonishment, in response, Watson lashed out and attacked me personally: “I know what people like you think,” he snarled. “You want everyone to be the same.” Then he proceeded to mock those who raise moral and ethical issues around modern genetics.

  I was truly offended, disappointed, and embarrassed, all at once. He had put words into my mouth that made me into a straw man he could easily knock down. As moderator of the session, I felt it would be wrong for me to start debating him, so I let him finish and called for the next question, my cheeks burning with rage. I knew that later that evening, when I was no longer moderator, I could rebut Watson, but he left immediately after our session was over. My rebuttal felt pretty hollow, but I gave it, saying Watson was totally wrongheaded. “Yes,” I said, “I believe in the concept of equality before the law, which is a magnificent concept. But as a geneticist, I know diversity and difference are a part of our makeup, and no one should want to diminish that.”

  Over the years, Watson has made many statements about his outlandish faith in the benefits of genetic manipulation on virtually every aspect of human development and behavior. But even today, merely thinking about Watson's outburst raises my blood pressure, though I know he was just being Jim.

  During the 1960s, as science departments everywhere were growing, there was tremendous competition for faculty members. Canadian research grants were so small that there was no way a hotshot scientist could be lured away from the U.S. As the elite American universities skimmed off the best candidates from Canada and the rest of the world, we were left competing with other Canadian universities and third-level American institutions for the rest. At a faculty meeting, I suggested that one way to build a top-grade research faculty at UBC would be to focus on recruiting women.

  At that time, most women still had difficulty finding tenure-track positions and were usually recruited as research associates or teachers in non-tenure-track jobs. It would have been far easier for a Canadian institution like UBC to recruit excellent female prospects and become a world-class school. At the time, the Zoology Department had one woman with tenure out of perhaps twenty-five faculty. The response to my proposal was dead silence; then discussion abruptly shifted to other matters. Once again I felt I had marginalized myself in the department with what was thought to be another kooky Suzuki idea.

  When I had been recruited by UBC, about 60 percent of the faculty in the Zoology Department were Canadians, and the rest were Britons and Americans. Canadian universities exploded in size as more and more students enrolled, so by the 1970s, Canadian institutions were graduating substantial numbers of students with PhDs. Yet we were hiring more and more Americans and Brits, and the proportion of Canadians in my department fell below 50 percent. At a departmental meeting, I suggested that when we received applications for a position, we should separate them into two piles, one for Canadians, the other for all the rest. We should then examine only the file of Canadians to see whether any applicants met our academic standards and needs. If there was someone who did, I recommended we try to recruit that person without even looking at the applicants in the other group. Only if we couldn't find someone of high enough caliber in the Canadian applications would we then look at the second group.

  I couldn't believe the response. One young professor from Britain called me a “fascist” and raised the specter of jackbooted Nazi-like brownshirts if my advice were followed. It was astonishing to see the equally angry reaction from others to my attempt to make it possible for Canadians to compete in a more equitable way without compromising academic standards. After all, by grading all applications together, Canadians would immediately be at a disadvantage just in numbers of competitors for the job.

  I don't want to imply that I suffered by being an outsider. In large measure, I chose to remain in that position by not playing the game. The politics of rising through the academic ranks never interested me, and so long as I had research support and great students, I was happy. I also remembered my father's admonition that if I wanted to be liked by everybody, I wouldn't stand for anything. If I was going to say what I believed, I had to be prepared for the reality that some people would always be pissed off at me. Many times in meetings, when I knew I would be a minority of one on an issue and would anger a lot of people, I would agonize over whether to let it pass and make my own life simpler. But I couldn't help responding if it was a matter of principle, even though everything in me just wanted to fit in and not make waves. My fellow faculty members would roll their eyes, suggesting they were thinking, “There goes Suzuki, grandstanding again.”

  An outsider sees things from a different angle and thus, I believe, often recognizes what others may not see. A scientist working in bio-technology with the prospect of making a lot of money from a product can be resistant, if not blind, to questions of hazards or risks that someone without a vested interest might see with greater clarity. For me, status as an outsider has been a mixed blessing. When I was younger, I so wanted to fit in and not stand apart, to be accepted and liked. However, on the outside, not only do I see things from a different perspective, but also I don't have a vested interest in the status quo or in companies, groups, or organizations of which I might be critical.

  chapter THREE

  A NEW CAREER

  IN 1954, WHEN I graduated from high school and went away to college, my family had never owned a television set. At that time in London, Ontario, television was still a novelty, and a pioneer who purchased a TV set required a giant antenna to pick up signals from Cleveland or Detroit. I remember the thrill of sitting in my uncle's living room watching shadowy on-screen images flitting through a curtain of heavy electronic snow—it was the technology more than the programs that fascinated us. But watching television had never been part of my early family life, and when I went away to college and then graduate school, I was too busy to watch TV.

  On another front that would turn out to be a thread in the fabric of my life, my father had encouraged me to take up public speaking. In Japanese culture, extreme deference is paid to authority and social position, and self-deprecation and politeness often mean people are reluctant to speak out or stand up for themselves or their ideas. In Canada, a cultu
re in which outspokenness or aggressive self-promotion is often admired, the inability of many Japanese Canadians to stand up and speak with enthusiasm or authority is a disability.

  My father was a very rare Japanese Canadian, outgoing, gregarious, and articulate, and he wanted me to be the same way. “You've got to be able to get up and speak in public,” he told me over and over when I was a teenager. He worked hard to train me to give speeches, and at his urging, I entered oratorical contests and won a number of them.

  Amherst College in the 1950s aimed to graduate students who were well rounded in the humanities and the sciences. Every Amherst undergraduate of the time, regardless of area of specialty, had to take such courses as English and American Studies and a foreign language; one of the more idiosyncratic requirements was that all students had to be able to swim two lengths of the pool. Amherst men also had to take public speaking in sophomore year. The course was a joke among the students, because no one ever failed, but I took it seriously and won top marks in the six speeches we had to give over two semesters. As well, as an honors biology student, I was required to make a scientific presentation to students and professors in each semester of my senior year, and I discovered I had an ability to present complex scientific topics in a way that not only was understandable but also excited the listeners. I realized teaching was something I enjoyed and could do well, and in graduate school this awareness was reinforced in the seminars and discussions I led.

  After I arrived at the University of Alberta in 1962 to take up my first academic position, I soon earned a reputation as a good lecturer and was invited to give a talk on a program called Your University Speaks, broadcast on a local television channel. It featured university professors lecturing on subjects in their areas of expertise, aided by slides. As the title of the show suggests, it was a pretty stodgy series. But I was curious and accepted the invitation (I think we were even paid twenty-five bucks), and apparently I did all right, because I was asked to go back the next week and the next and the next until I ended up doing eight programs. The series was broadcast early Sunday mornings, so I was shocked when people stopped me and told me how much they had enjoyed one of the shows I had done. Initially I couldn't understand why anyone would watch TV on a Sunday morning, but I began to realize television had become a powerful vehicle to inform people.

  I moved to the University of British Columbia a year after returning to Canada, and in Vancouver I was asked to appear on television to do the occasional book review or commentary on a scientific story. I became more interested in the medium as a way to communicate and ended up proposing a television series to look at cutting-edge science. Knowlton Nash was head of programming at the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) and approved the series to come out of Vancouver. At one point, he called Keith Christie, who had been assigned to produce the series, and asked how “it” was going. Keith asked what he was talking about, and Knowlton replied, “You know, that Suzuki-on-science series.” Keith tells me he said, “That's it,” and the show was called Suzuki on Science. It was broadcast across the country in 1969 and was my first involvement in a television series with a national audience. It ran for two seasons and was renewed for a third, but I quit: we had a lousy time slot and low budget and I saw no future for the show, exciting though making the series had been.

  In 1974, Jim Murray, longtime executive producer of The Nature of Things on CBC Television, began a new show called Science Magazine, a weekly half-hour collection of reports on science, technology, and medicine. He had known about my Vancouver-based series, and after we met and talked, he hired me to be the host of the new one. It was an immediate hit, drawing an audience that was 50 percent larger than the long-running popular series The Nature of Things, which had begun in 1960. I took a leave from UBC to host the program.

  Halfway through that first season, Knowlton Nash informed us the series would be dropped. We were shocked, but we carried on. At the end of the last show, I told the audience this was the final segment, thanked them for watching, and said goodbye. I didn't lament our passing or plead for support, but viewers responded with letters and phone calls objecting to our cancellation. The series was restored and ran for four more years.

  Being interviewed by students in the late 1960s

  During the first season of Science Magazine, Diana Filer, executive producer of the CBC Radio series Concern, attended a speech I gave at the University of Toronto. She had proposed a new science series for radio called Quirks and Quarks and hired me to host it when it went to air in 1975. I was host of both Science Magazine on television and Quirks and Quarks on radio, which was a full-time job, until 1979.

  Diana also introduced me to Bruno Gerussi, whose CBC Radio show had been a forerunner of Peter Gzowski's This Country in the Morning. Bruno became a good friend, and I would often drop in on him in Gibsons on the Sunshine Coast just north of Vancouver, where he lived while filming his long-running CBC Television series The Beachcombers. On one of those visits, he met my father and grew very fond of him, eventually inviting him to play a guest role on an episode.

  Bruno also had a script written in which I played a scientist in search of a rare coastal tree. In one segment of that episode, I appeared with the First Nations actor Chief Dan George, who had starred so powerfully in the film Little Big Man with Dustin Hoffman. I was awed and thrilled to be in his presence, but by then he was quite old and frail. In the story, I seek his advice on where the rare tree might be. When I arrived for the shoot, Chief George was seated in a rocking chair on a house porch and covered with a blanket. As the crew went about setting up the lighting and camera, I tried to chat with him. He replied in a barely audible voice, so I realized I was draining his energy and left him alone; I worried about whether he could perform.

  Once the camera was rolling and the producer called out “Action!”, Chief George threw off the blanket, straightened up, and delivered his lines forcefully with that unique voice. As soon as the director shouted “Cut!”, the chief immediately drew the blanket up around his shoulders and slumped back into the chair. He delivered like a trouper by conserving his strength between every take. Now that's being a professional.

  In 1979, I left both Science Magazine and Quirks and Quarks to become host of The Nature of Things, which had been reformatted and was to become an hour-long program called The Nature of Things with David Suzuki. I left radio with great reluctance. It was the medium I enjoyed most, because interviews were relaxed, and there was an opportunity to be spontaneous, humorous, and even risqué, since tapes could be edited and still retain warmth and intimacy.

  In contrast, television is very controlled, because airtime is so valuable. After I've given a speech, I often encounter people who tell me I'm so different from my persona on TV. But it shouldn't be a surprise; that person on-screen is a creation of the medium. My on-camera appearances are carefully planned and controlled, then prepackaged, and the narration is laid down in a studio, where my reading is carefully delivered to fit the pictures. Because radio burns through material and, as host of Quirks and Quarks, I had to do all of the interviews, it demanded far more of my time than television. There was also no denying the much greater audience size of television and therefore, potentially, its greater impact. So I reluctantly gave up Quirks and Quarks, but I continue to take vicarious pride that it has endured and flourished under a number of excellent hosts.

  When I began to work in television in 1962, I never dreamed that it would ultimately occupy most of my life and make me a celebrity in Canada. I thought I might have a knack for translating the arcane jargon of science into the vernacular of the lay public, and I felt that speaking on television was a responsibility I had assumed by accepting government research grants and public support in a university. When I appeared on a television show for the first time, I enjoyed the novelty, but I did not anticipate the notoriety that would come from being on-screen regularly. Looking back, I realize how incredibly naive I was. I just didn't understand the rel
ationship between a viewer, television, and information.

  Nim Chimpsky, who was taught to use sign language by Herb Terrace of Columbia University

  Television is an ephemeral medium; a program we might work for months to create flashes onto the screen to an audience often distracted by other activities—feeding the kids, answering the phone, going to the toilet, walking the dog, getting a drink. Viewers aren't fully engaged through the entire program, and what is ultimately remembered may be a snippet. And if a show is part of a series such as The Nature of Things with David Suzuki, in which diverse topics are covered, the subject matter of any given show may be forgotten, but the one constant feature from week to week—the host—is remembered.

  Over time, a relationship is established wherein the audience comes to trust the host and to believe in what he or she is conveying. Think of the enormous following of people like American journalist Walter Cronkite and Canadian counterpart Peter Mansbridge. In the same vein, I too am transformed from being the carrier of information to an “expert.” People assume I am an authority on each subject we cover on the series and that I must know everything in the area of science, the environment, technology, medicine, and so on. Strangers often approach me to ask a very specific question about treatment for a disease, a new technology for cleaning up the environment, or an obscure species discovered in the Amazon. When I answer that I have no idea, they stare in disbelief and demand, “What do you mean, you don't know? I thought you knew everything!”

  Even back in the 1960s, when I was dabbling in television, it was referred to as “the boob tube,” and I knew program offerings were mainly idiotic or dull or both. When I entered television as a new career, I was conceited enough to think my shows would be different, glistening like jewels in the muck. Because I was not in the habit of watching television, I thought people would carefully read the program listings to find out what important, interesting, or entertaining show was coming up, look forward to it with great anticipation, turn on the set just before the show was to appear, and sit riveted through the entire program. When it was over, I thought, people would turn off the television and then discuss the show with someone else.