The Nature Of David Suzuki

Genetics. In David Suzuki, a love of nature was forged in trying circumstances. He shaped it into a life's profession and made it his mission to convey it to masses of people through television. ------------------------------------------------------------------- When geneticist David Suzuki was 6 years old, he experienced firsthand just how powerfully one's genetic legacy can shape the course of life.

That year, 1942, Suzuki, his family and others of Japanese descent living in Canada (like those in the United States) were forced to leave their homes and placed in government relocation camps. After the bombing of Pearl Harbor, they were deemed a risk to national security.

For the next three years, Suzuki's family lived in an abandoned mining town in the Slocan Valley, near the Canadian Rockies. But for young David, the camp proved to be a crucial turning point, a period when nature and nurture collaborated to shape a future.

It is a period to which Suzuki returns at key points in "The Secret of Life," a PBS science series he is hosting that explores advances in genetic research and their frightening implications.

The show's first segment opens with a sequence filmed in the Slocan Valley. As Suzuki notes, it was because of his genetic inheritance that he was placed in the camp, but it was in his new surroundings that he began to find his life's path. It was there, in the pristine beauty of the valley, that Suzuki discovered his love of nature.

Suzuki, long a familiar face on Canadian television, has been explaining science since the early '60s. Since 1979, he has hosted "The Nature of Things," seen in the U.S. on the Discovery Channel. His weekly science column is carried by 31 Canadian newspapers.

In "The Secret of Life," Suzuki is the unifying thread that runs through the series' disparate segments. He gives the material a human face, sometimes personalizing it through his own life.

After the war, the family wasn't allowed to return to Vancouver and was forced to resettle in Ontario. His parents, both born in Canada, lost the dry cleaning business they had kept alive through the Depression.

Suzuki remembers emerging from camp confused about his identity. As one of the few children to have parents who were both born in Canada, Suzuki spoke no Japanese, and was often beaten by other children.

"I grew up hating being Japanese. I hated my parents, my sisters and I didn't want to be seen walking with them. I wanted to have an eye operation and dye my hair," he said. "There was a lot of self-hatred."

What saved him was the gentle guidance of his father, who advised him to concentrate on his studies to succeed. Throwing himself into his school work paid off, and Suzuki won a scholarship to Amherst College in Massachusetts.

As a pre-med student there Suzuki took a genetics course. He was instantly drawn to the precision of this branch of science. Ultimately, he chose not to go to medical school, opting instead to do genetic research.

"My mom wept for weeks. She just couldn't understand why I didn't want to go to medical school," Suzuki said. From Amherst he went on to the University of Chicago, and later worked in the biology division of the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee.

His southern sojourn during the early 1960s was instrumental in his political awakening and ultimately to his return to Canada.

"Because of my experiences in camp, I became deeply involved in the civil-rights movement," Suzuki said. "It was also why I had to leave the States because I couldn't stand the blatant racism."

It was in Canada that Suzuki stumbled into his broadcasting career. In 1962, when he returned home to teach at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, he was added to the lineup of professors whose lectures were aired by a local station.

After he started teaching, Suzuki learned to his horror that it was the early geneticists who set in motion the racist theories that ultimately led to the relocation of the Japanese and the Holocaust.

"It was a terrible realization," Suzuki said. "It was partly why I became involved in television. I believe these issues where science intersects with people are too important to leave in the hands of a few scientists and business-men."

When he joined the zoology department of the University of British Columbia in Vancouver in 1963, Suzuki continued his television work. He was a natural, an expert completely at ease with the medium. Suzuki again credits his father for his success.

"My father was a raconteur," Suzuki said. "He taught me after the war that in order to be able to do well, you've got to be able to do two things: speak extemporaneously and dance. I still don't understand the dancing part, but learned to be a speaker."

By 1969, Suzuki was a full professor at the University of British Columbia focused on researching gene regulation, the process through which different cells get their instructions.

As he built his academic career, he also juggled his other career and a family. In 1965, he was divorced from his first wife, with whom he had three children. He married his second wife, Tara Cullis, a former instructor at Harvard, in the mid-1970s. The couple have two children.

In the mid-1980s, Suzuki stopped teaching to concentrate on his television work, although he officially remains on faculty. For part of the year, he leaves his home in Vancouver to live in Toronto, where "The Nature of Things" is produced.

"I had to make a decision: Was I going to do what I was doing, or really step off the edge and go in a radically different area?" Suzuki said. Eventually he chose TV, because of its ability to reach so many people. "There are a lot of scientists, but only a few who take the media seriously."

Suzuki's efforts to bridge the communication gap between science and the public is admirable, said Tom Grigliatti, a genetics professor at the University of British Columbia.

"Dave has the ability to explain very complicated things in a very simple, but not simplistic, way," Grigliatti said. "Most of us can't do that. We'd like to but we can't. It's great that we have someone like Dave who's an excellent communicator and who can communicate the sheer joy of discovery."

Suzuki, who was a founding member of Scientists for Social Responsibility in 1981, is particularly interested in keeping the public informed about the advances in genetics.

Even before "The Secret of Life," Suzuki had raised questions about genetic research in previous works, including his book "Genethics: The Ethics of Engineering Life." Since that book was first published in 1988, the number of ethical issues has grown, Suzuki said.

He is especially wary of the growing role businesses play in scientific research. He cites as an example the push to develop a human growth hormone. As scientists develop ways to make the hormone more easily, new markets will need to be created to justify the money invested. The technology, he says, may be use on those who are made to feel a need for it - for example, children who are simply shorter than their peers.

"I happen to think that's a major slippery slope," Suzuki said. "There's an unseemly haste to profit without enough deliberation on what the implications are."

Suzuki has also become outspoken about environmental issues, and is particularly critical of the logging practices in his home province. His opinions have drawn criticisms from opponents who point out that Suzuki's background is not ecology or environmental science.

Even in the scientific community, Suzuki has come under attack by colleagues who feel he is improperly using his standing as a scientist, Grigliatti said.

Suzuki defends his outspokenness: "Just because I'm trained in genetics doesn't mean that I don't have the capacity to be knowledgeable about other areas."

While Suzuki doesn't believe that the pursuit of scientific knowledge should be restrained, he said some things may be better left alone.

In 1984, Suzuki's mother died from Alzheimer's disease. While there are now tests for some forms of the disease, there is none yet for the type that Suzuki's mother had. Suzuki, however, knows that he has 1 in 20 chance of inheriting the affliction. But he adds that if a test were available, he is not sure that he would take it.

As scientists come closer to completely unraveling the secrets of the DNA, the temptation to simplify humanity has to be resisted, Suzuki said.

"You can't reduce human beings to sequences of DNA," he said. "Biological determinism reduces human beings, and diminishes humankind." ------------------------------------------------------------------- Performance schedule

The last half of "The Secret of Life" airs from 9 to 11 o'clock tonight and tomorrow on Channel 9. Tonight's two episodes focus on the genetic engineering of sheep, plants and other life forms and on the immune system. Tomorrow's segments examine scientific efforts to fix genetic problems and studies of twins.

A book, "The Secret of Life: Redesigning the Living World" (WGBH, $24.95), co-written by David Suzuki and Joseph Levine, accompanies the series.