Сhapter TWO
I ATTENDED COLLEGE IN the United States as a result of a chance encounter with John Thompson, a former classmate in London. His father headed the business school at the University of Western Ontario, in London, and John, an American citizen, left London after completing grade 12 to enroll at Amherst College in Amherst, Massachusetts. I met him on the street while he was home visiting, and he raved about Amherst and suggested I apply. He had application forms sent to me, so I filled them out and sent them off. I hadn't taken the SATS or AP courses that many Canadian students now do, and I didn't have the extracurricular or athletic experiences that applicants to top universities usually have. All I had was my academic record. I learned later that John had made a strong pitch for me to the dean of admissions, Eugene Wilson, and I was accepted with a scholarship of $1,500, which at that time was more than my father earned in a year.
In the 1950s, the same grade 13 exams were written by all students in Ontario and acted as an academic filter. Most students left high school at the end of grade 12, and grade 13 was for those intending to go to university. But many of those who flunked grade 13 ended up going to American universities, so it was our common perception that U.S. universities had much lower academic standards than Canadian institutions. Not only that, Americans went only to grade 12 before entering university, and I had had an extra year of schooling. I thought Amherst would be a piece of cake.
Boy, did I learn in a hurry that there is a vast range among post-secondary institutions in the U.S. Yes, there are some universities and private colleges where academic standards can be pretty low, and state colleges and universities vary tremendously in academic stature and standards. Private schools also range in quality, but there are many top-rated liberal arts colleges throughout the U.S., including Amherst, Swarthmore, Reed, and Smith. The best and/or well-off students in the U.S. often attend private preparatory high schools, where the goal of the program is to gain admission into a leading academic institution. Over a quarter of my class at Amherst had been valedictorians in their high schools. Students with poor records wouldn't even bother applying, and of the students who did apply, fewer than one in ten was accepted. So these were pretty impressive students. As a scholarship recipient, I had to remain in the top 20 percent of my class to retain the support. No problem, I thought, since I'd had that extra year of a Canadian high school, which we knew was superior to begin with.
I sure had my comeuppance with the first midterm exams. I was not going to coast through Amherst as I had through high school. Suddenly I had to develop efficient study habits, learn to use the library, and write thoughtful essays. Amherst honed my academic skills, and I am grateful that I was able to attend a top-notch undergraduate school and receive an elite education that had no counterpart in Canada. I admire and support the enlightened policy that funded a foreign student like me in the belief that we added to the education of all at Amherst. I can't help contrasting that with Canadian universities that now accept foreign students merely to exploit them by charging exorbitant tuition fees.
I was the first person in my family to graduate from a university. Although my grandparents had not intended to remain in Canada, their Canadian-born children—my parents—had no interest in moving to Japan, because Canada was their country. They pounded home the importance of education as a means for us to escape the extreme poverty we found ourselves in after the war. The biggest fear I had during my youth was that my father might yank me out of school and put me to work.
Most of the students at Amherst came from families whose members had attended university for generations. They were well traveled, many having spent summers abroad. They went to concerts and listened to classical music. They read books for pleasure and attended the theater. These students were cultured, experienced, self-confident, and very bright, and I have never felt more of a yokel than when I first arrived on campus.
At Amherst I also found that most Americans knew almost nothing about Canada. If, on rare occasions, they thought about the country, they regarded it as an annex to the U.S. Nevertheless, I was classed as a foreign student and in my freshman year took advantage of the foreign-student program to stay with an American family for the Thanksgiving holiday. I was shocked when, during the traditional turkey dinner, the conversation became very serious and political and the mother began a loud and animated argument with her husband. In my family, women did not get into discussions in which there might be disagreements. My mother would leave the serious talking in public to my father (although I learned after her death that she was quite outspoken and influential with Dad when they were alone). And she would most certainly never confront him or disagree with him when there were others around. That Thanksgiving was my first intimation of what equality of the sexes might mean.
In London, puberty in a time of straitlaced attitudes toward sex, fear of pregnancy, and “shotgun marriages” was difficult enough, but as a Japanese Canadian scarred by the war and internment, I had a small potential field of girls to consider. Restricted by my father's edict that I must find a mate who was Japanese, I protested there were too few teenage Japanese girls in all of London, so Dad allowed me to consider dating a Chinese Canadian. “Dad,” I pleaded, “there are only three Chinese families here and I don't know any of them.” “Okay, okay,” he relented, “a Native girl is all right.” When I pointed out that there might be First Nations reserves on the outskirts of town, but I certainly did not know any Native girls, he added a black girl to the list of acceptables. The only black girl I knew was Annabel Johnson, and she certainly was not interested in me. “All right, I'll allow a Jewish girl,” he said, grudgingly, having run out of visible minorities. Dad's descending order of potential mates was based on ethnicity and the extent to which he felt the women themselves would have experienced prejudice, but he failed to recognize that he implicitly accepted the stereotypes and limitations of the bigots.
In grade 12, I had asked the prettiest Japanese girl in London, Joane Sunahara, to go to a New Year's Eve dance. She turned out to be a terrific dancer and an even better kisser, and soon I had my first steady girlfriend. When I became student president at Central Collegiate, she became a vice president of students at Tech, and we were a couple at all the social events at the two schools. But once we had graduated, she went on to Ryerson in Toronto, and we understood that we would stay in touch but also date others.
Amherst College had been an all-male school since its inception in 1821. After a long, often rancorous debate, in 1974 the board of trustees voted to integrate the sexes, with female transfer students being admitted that fall and the first fully integrated freshman class admitted in 1976. Today, women and men are almost equal in number. When I was at Amherst, we dated women from the all-female schools Smith and Mount Holyoke colleges, seven and ten miles away, respectively. Each fall when I returned to Amherst, I would anxiously scan the freshman books from Smith and Mount Holyoke, looking for the three or four Asian students I would consider asking for a date. At social events, I was acutely conscious of being Japanese.
In my freshman year there was another Asian student, a Japanese American from Hawaii, on the same dorm floor, but he only exacerbated my sense of insecurity. Gordon was of very big physique for an Asian, and he had an outgoing personality. His father was a wealthy Honolulu dentist and businessman. Gordon was very conscious of clothes, and I learned from him that dirty white bucks were de rigueur and that wool challis ties, charcoal-gray suits, and pink button-down shirts were what the well-dressed person of that time wore. I couldn't afford them. But it didn't matter, because I had never been interested in clothing styles and was content to let my parents buy clothes for me. I hung around Gordon simply because he was another Asian who I felt shared with me a common background.
Nothing could have been further from the truth. Gordon had been reared in privilege. Japanese Americans in Hawaii had not been incarcerated during World War II, and he had gone to Punahou, a private school in Honolulu. He was self-confident, and our shared Asianness was inconsequential to him. I think he tolerated me the way one tolerates a mutt, with a mixture of amusement and pity.
When his father visited in our freshman year, they invited me to go out to dinner with them. I was working on the breakfast shift in the Amherst dining hall, starting at 6:00 every morning and earning $1.50 an hour for spending money. They took me to a fancy restaurant, where I was floored by the cost of the offerings on the menu. When the bill arrived, I offered to pay my share with great trepidation. To my relief, Gordon's father picked up the tab, but I vowed never to go to dinner with them again. And I didn't. There was an enormous barrier created by our different experiences of the war. In Hawaii, the population of Japanese Americans was too great to consider their wholesale incarceration, even though the Japanese attack had been on Pearl Harbor in Honolulu. Japanese Americans flourished in Hawaii, whereas my sense of self and personality had been sculpted by poverty, ignorance, and a sense of shame.
In the fall of 1957, my senior year at Amherst, an epidemic of Asian flu swept the world. Despite our rural setting, Amherst did not provide a sanctuary from it, and like many others, I finally succumbed to the virus. I staggered to the infirmary, only to find it filled with sick guys who booed me. There were only a handful of Asians on campus at that time, so it was easy to jokingly blame us for the Asian flu, but I was too sick to care anyway.
I collapsed into bed, feeling terrible, with only the radio as a diversion. I was jolted out of my illness when an announcer interrupted the programming to inform us that the Soviet Union had successfully launched a satellite called Sputnik into space. It was only the size of a basketball, but it was an electrifying achievement, the first man-made object to escape the atmosphere and orbit Earth. I had no inkling that there was even a space program, and the feat captured my imagination. But in the months that followed, I and the rest of America agonized as the United States initially failed in spectacular fashion to get a satellite into orbit while the USSR announced one first after another—Laika, the first animal (a dog) in space; Yuri Gagarin, the first man; the first team of cosmonauts; Valentina Tereshkova, the first woman.
In belatedly recognizing that the Soviets were very advanced in science, engineering, math, and medicine, the U.S. became determined to catch up by pouring money into students, universities, and government labs. In the post-Sputnik frenzy, every effort was made to attract students into science, and even though I was Canadian, I later received funding to carry on with my graduate studies at the University of Chicago.
There was an excitement that came from the infusion of money and government priority for science. We were taught in graduate school that science is the most powerful way of learning about the world. Through science we probed the deepest secrets of nature—the structure of matter itself, the edges of the universe, the genetic code. Implicit in our education was the notion that science rejected emotion and subjectivity and sought only truth.
The queen of all sciences was physics, especially theoretical physics. Biology was a fuzzy science; life is messy and does not readily lend itself to the kind of exquisite experiments done in physics. And within biology, there was a definite pecking order, with taxonomy and systematics (which geneticists contemptuously referred to as stamp collecting), ecology, and organismic biology on the bottom and molecular biology and genetics at the very apex (at least, that's the way geneticists saw it).
I had always wanted to be a biologist. In my early years, I dreamed of being an ichthyologist, someone who studies fish. As a child, I fantasized about being able to fly-fish for my experimental animals and then eat them when the experiment was finished. What could be more heavenly than that? Later, when I became an avid collector of insects, I considered entomology as a possible profession. But it was in my third year of college that, as a biology honors student, I was required to take a course in genetics and fell madly in love with the elegance and mathematical precision of the discipline. I loved reading arcane and difficult papers on exquisite experiments and discovered I had a knack for setting up complex experiments to solve very specific questions.
I had been assured of a place in medical school at the University of Western Ontario in London, but I decided to abandon medicine for genetics. My mother was disconsolate for weeks after I told her I was not going to become a doctor, and that I would study fruit flies instead.
By the time I had made this decision, it was too late to apply for scholarships or teaching assistantships. I had hoped to work with the famous geneticist Curt Stern at the University of California at Berkeley; although I had been accepted there, I was too late to receive any financial support. Joane and I were still an item and planned to get married, so I couldn't afford to go without such help. Bill Hexter, my thesis adviser at Amherst, called a friend, Bill Baker, a fruit fly geneticist at the University of Chicago, who offered me a position as his research assistant supported by his grant.
My professor Bill Baker, fellow PhD student Anita Hessler,
and me in the fly lab at the University of Chicago
When I graduated from Amherst in 1958 with an honors degree (cum laude) in biology, I knew I could at least be a good teacher, but upon entering graduate school at the University of Chicago I found I had a burning desire to do experimental science. I enrolled as a student in the Zoology Department, and Joane, whom I had married in August 1958, worked as a technician preparing specimens for the electron microscope, a highly demanding task at which she excelled. I had taken a course on marriage and sex in my last year of college, so I figured I knew all I needed to plan ahead. Unfortunately, passion and sloppiness intruded, and all of our plans for the future went out the window when Joane became pregnant. So much for the significance of an A grade in the course I had taken. Tamiko was born in January 1960, a wonderful surprise who took over my life.
Joane and Tamiko
Tamiko's arrival put a lot of pressure on me to complete my degree. Joane would work in the day while I took care of Tamiko, most often taking her to the lab, where she could sleep in the buggy while I counted fruit flies. I would take her home for dinner and then leave to spend long nights continuing the experiments. The work paid off, as I completed my doctorate in zoology in less than three years after graduating from Amherst.
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 first-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.
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.