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Since the mid 1970s, Suzuki’s TV and radio series and books have sought to educate in an engaging way about nature and the environment. He is best known as host of the popular and long-running CBC TV science magazine, The Nature of Things, seen in syndication in over 40 nations. Early lifeSuzuki and his twin sister Marcia were born to Setsu and Kaoru Carr Suzuki in Vancouver, Canada. Suzuki's maternal and paternal grandparents had immigrated to Canada at the beginning of the 20th century. A third-generation Japanese-Canadian ("Canadian Sansei"), Suzuki and his family suffered internment in British Columbia during the Second World War from when he was six (1942) until after the war ended. In June 1942, the government sold the Suzuki family's dry-cleaning business, then interned Suzuki, his mother, and two sisters in a camp in the Slocan Valley in the BC Interior. His father had been sent to a labour camp in Solsqua two months earlier. Suzuki's sister, Dawn, was born in the internment camp. After the war, Suzuki's family, like other Japanese Canadian families, was forced to move east of the Rockies. The Suzukis moved to Islington, Leamington, and London, Ontario. David Suzuki, in interviews, has many times credited his father for having interested him in, and sensitized him to, nature. Suzuki attended Mill Street Elementary School and Grade 9 at Leamington Secondary School before moving to London, where he attended London Central Secondary School.
Academic careerSuzuki received his BA from Amherst College in Massachusetts in 1958, and his Ph.D in zoology from the University of Chicago in 1961. Early in his research career he studied genetics, using the popular model organism Drosophila melanogaster (fruit flies). To be able to use his initials in naming any new genes he found, he studied Drosophila temperature-sensitive phenotypes (DTS). (As he jokingly noted at a lecture at Johns Hopkins University, the only alternative was "damn tough skin".) He gained several international awards for his research into these mutations. He was a professor in the zoology department at the University of British Columbia for over thirty years (from 1963 until his retirement in 2001), and has since been professor emeritus at a university research institute. For his work popularizing science and environmental issues, he has been presented with 19 honorary degrees (all doctorates) from schools in Canada, The United States, and Australia. He has notably received an honorary doctorate from Lakehead University (Thunder Bay, Ontario, Canada), a nationally renowned centre for environmental studies and activism.
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