David Suzuki

David Suzuki is Canada’s preeminent science broadcaster. He also carries a global reputation as a geneticist, professor, public lecturer, and environmental and civil rights activist.

The dozens of TV and radio series and specials that Suzuki has hosted strike a layman’s balance between education and entertainment. He is best known as the long-time moderator of the highly successful CBC TV science magazine show, The Nature of Things, which airs in more than 40 nations. His 1985 series, A Planet for the Taking averaged 1.8 million viewers per episode and earned him a United Nations Environment Program Medal (1988).

After geneticist and broadcaster David Suzuki became a noted world authority on the fruit fly, he devoted himself full-time to environmental concerns and, in doing so, popularized science for millions. His latest volume, The Sacred Balance (1997), reinforces this theme. [Photo, courtesy Canadian Broadcasting Corporation]

Described as “one of the world’s most effective popularizers of science, alongside Carl Sagan and Jacques Cousteau,” Suzuki has considerable charm and intelligence. His social consciousness is as sharp as his piercing eyes. Jerry Bruckley observed in International Wildlife, “He’s passionate, driven, irreverent, brilliant, charismatic, and controversial, and usually in the same sentence.”

As a young zoology professor at the University of British Columbia, Suzuki gained international recognition for his research into temperature-sensitive genetic mutations in fruit flies, work that won him, for three years running (1969-71), the E.W.R. Steacie Memorial Fellowship, presented to Canada’s Best Young Scientist Under 35. Over the years, Suzuki has delivered more than 500 lectures around the world, has received no fewer than 11 honorary university degrees. Presented with the 1968 UNESCO Kalinga Prize for science writing, he joined such celebrated company as Julian Huxley, Bertrand Russell, and Margaret Mead.

A third-generation Japanese-Canadian, Suzuki, born in Vancouver, British Columbia, on March 24, 1936, was raised in the back of the family dry cleaner’s shop. On weekly fishing and camping trips, his father pointed out all the animals, birds, trees, and plants they encountered. Suzuki later said, “These activities shaped my interests for the rest of my life.”

Like all Japanese-Canadians living on Canada’s West coast, as a consequence of a war-time measure by the federal government, the Suzukis were sent, in 1942, to live in an internment camp at Slocan, British Columbia. Spending four years in squalid conditions, he still excelled in school but his inability to speak Japanese alienated him from his peers. The whole experience left lasting scars.

His family relocated to Leamington, Ontario, after the war. Here Suzuki turned his bedroom into a naturalist’s haven stocked with fossils, rocks, freshwater fish, insects, dead animals, etc. Upon graduating from high school in London, Ontario, he earned a scholarship to Amherst College in Massachusetts; there, a first-year course in genetics found him “astonished at the beauty of the insights, and the elegance of mathematical precision absent from most other areas of biology.” Graduating cum laude in 1958 with a B.A. in Biology, he continued his graduate studies, earning a Ph.D. in Zoology at the University of Chicago in 1961. Suzuki’s doctoral thesis examined the chromosomal crossover of the fruit fly.

Shunning lucrative U.S. job offers in favour of an assistant professor’s post at the University of Alberta, he returned to Canada in 1962, moving on, in 1963, to the University of British Columbia, where he became professor of zoology at age 33. There Suzuki successfully bred a mutant strain of fruit fly that died when the temperature reached 29 degrees C. This marked a breakthrough in biological pest control as these heat-sensitive insects could now be mated with ordinary fruit flies — which damage crops and bother humans — to produce a generation that would die during the first hot spell.

His discoveries drew the attention of scientists around the world, and, in 1968, Suzuki served as Canadian delegate to the International Congress of Genetics in Tokyo. By the early 1970s, a 20-plus staff was working in his lab where he often slept at nights on a hammock. Such dedication to research cost Suzuki his first marriage in 1965. Moreover, his increasing concerns about the potential negative impacts on society of science and technology prompted Suzuki, in the mid-70s, to abandon much of his scientific research.

From 1974-79, Suzuki hosted the CBC radio show, Quirks and Quarks (which is still going strong) and the TV show, Science Magazine. Together, they were reaching 1.5 million Canadian homes by 1977. By 1979, CBC merged Science Magazine with the popular Nature of Things (already into its 15th season), making Suzuki a global star. By 1984, The Nature of Things was the CBC’s most-watched program generating more foreign sales for the network than any other CBC production.

With the 1985 airing of A Planet For The Taking and the 1989 radio show, It’s a Matter of Survival, Suzuki assumed a more confrontational environmentalist stance and said that the public “must take a strong advocacy position” to protect the earth lingering on the edge of extinction. In 1990, he and his second wife, Dr. Tara Cullis, founded the David Suzuki Foundation, dedicated to developing “a world vision of sustainable communities living within the planet’s carrying capacity.” In 1992, Suzuki and their daughter Severn (then age 12) both spoke at the landmark Earth Summit Conference in Rio de Janeiro.

Suzuki is the author of 18 books, including, with A.F. Griffiths, An Introduction to Genetic Analysis (1976), one of the most-used genetics textbooks in the U.S. He has also penned children’s books and countless regular columns for Canadian newspapers.

Suzuki’s many honours include being named Outstanding Japanese-Canadian of the Year in 1972, winning a Canadian Human Rights Foundation Award in 1975 and a Governor General’s Award for Conservation in 1985. Named an Officer of the Order of Canada in 1976, Suzuki has claimed several Gemini and ACTRA awards for his broadcast works.