The author is a historian, sociologist, writer and retired teacher from the University of Quebec at Chicoutimi in the history, sociology, anthropology, political science and international cooperation programs. His research focuses on collective imaginations.
Born in Montreal in 1930, Charles Scriver taught all his life at McGill University. After studying geography and literature, he went on to pediatrics and then became a very high-level geneticist, enjoying worldwide renown. He made his mark on this scale by exerting a leadership that contributed to a momentous reorientation of human genetics, both in biochemistry and in genetic epidemiology. Here are the circumstances in which I met him and how a collaboration was born which lasted about twenty years and was doubled along the way by a deep friendship.
My doctoral research in Paris had converted me to social history then in full swing. The objective of this historical genre was to account for all the dimensions of a society and its actors, well beyond the “great” characters who were said to “make” history. This was obviously ignoring the movements of the multitude who worked in poverty and anonymity. In my thesis (The motionless village), I practiced this kind of research by studying a French village over a period of a century.
Back in Quebec, I planned to reproduce the same approach throughout an entire region. The task of collecting data then took on colossal proportions, which required processing them by computer. Things got off to a good start, but very soon I realized that the costs of the project were well beyond the funding capacities of social science granting agencies. I lived through several months of anguish, then an opening presented itself.
With the team that I had formed, we had developed a computer system which made it possible to automatically reconstitute family and genealogical links. Built for the purposes of social history (the study of the transmission of social status between generations, for example), this database, I realized, could be used to study everything that is transmitted between generations, including genes. From then on, a great adventure opened before me: the possibility of a new direction of research devoted to the study of the deleterious genes at the origin of genetic diseases and to the prevention of these diseases.
A first try
I decided to give it a try. I first went to the United States to do an internship in a biochemistry laboratory, followed by another internship in Paris in population genetics and genetic epidemiology. Later, with the collaboration of local doctors, I obtained access to the files of Saguenay patients suffering from genopathies and I was able to carry out a first trial, which turned out to be conclusive. Armed with this realization, I tried to arouse the interest of Quebec medical circles, without success. It was then that I was suggested to contact a man named Charles Scriver, from McGill University.
Here awaited me a huge and very happy surprise. I phoned Charles Scriver (me, the novice historian-sociologist from Chicoutimi…) and briefly explained my project to him. Against all odds, he gave me an appointment for the next day. I spent an hour in his little office. He spoke very little, listening to me attentively.
Towards the end of the meeting, I made the following proposal to him: McGill University would pay me $25,000 annually over an indefinite period, in return for which its geneticists would obtain priority access to our database (now called the BALSAC file ). I expected him to fall out of his chair before a request as naive as it was extravagant. He didn’t. He simply and politely told me that our conversation was over. I went home in my little shoes.
The next day, I received a phone call from Charles: he had spoken to his rector, everything was settled…!
From that moment, everything went very quickly. I was able to easily convince a few other universities to join the project (under the same conditions). Henceforth, access to substantial subsidies from organizations in the medical sphere was open to me, BALSAC was able to expand spectacularly, an interuniversity research center comprising six universities was set up, operating under my direction for twenty years, and there was never any question of moving the heart of the activities outside of my university. All of this, ultimately, thanks to Charles Scriver.
I say he was a great Quebecer, for three reasons. First, while the most prestigious universities in the world were open to him, he chose to stay in Montreal and share his work with our scientific community. He was a great Quebecer also because he was a generous visionary: at a time when my adventure could have ended there, he saw the benefit that could be drawn from my file project and the services that it could give back to the people of Quebec, especially those in the regions. Finally, he took big risks with his rector by trusting a young Saguenayen who knew nothing about genetics and who claimed to equip him with a new infrastructure.
Charles Scriver died last month in Montreal at the age of 93. I have in my heart a candle which burns for him and which will not go out.