Among the great Quebecers, it’s not just René Lévesque (1922-1987) who would have turned 100 this year. This is also the case, and I may come back to this, of political scientist Léon Dion (1922-1997), who described himself, at the end of his career, as a “tired federalist”, convinced that one could not negotiate with English Canada only by putting a knife to its throat, and of the science communicator Fernand Seguin, born June 9, 1922 and died prematurely, at age 66, in June 1988.
Trained in biochemistry at the University of Montreal in the mid-1940s, Seguin was briefly a researcher at the Saint-Jean-de-Dieu psychiatric hospital before devoting himself, from the 1950s, to scientific communication, mainly on Radio -Canada. Friend of writers and scholars, Seguin, a pioneer in the field, was an outstanding science popularizer, endowed with a broad general culture, a remarkable mastery of the language and an uncommon wisdom.
“As comfortable in his denunciations of certain abuses of ecological philosophy as in his criticisms of technological inflation, wrote about him the scientific journalist Jean-Marc Carpentier in 1988, [Seguin] liked to recall that ideology is always a bad mistress in the realm of knowledge. A scientist without being a scientist, he knew that knowledge of nature is an essential component of human culture. With imagination, passion and humour, he presents us with a science with a human face. Like the biologist Jean Rostand (1894-1977), his hero, Seguin was first and foremost a humanist.
His written work, essentially composed of radio chronicles, can be found in two books, The bomb and the orchid and The crystal and the chimera, brought together in a single volume by Libre Expression in 2003. This wonderful work, both instructive and very pleasant to read, can only be found in libraries. I am lucky to have it in mine and, on the occasion of its author’s centenary, I read it again with great pleasure.
Seguin is a master of scientific culture, that is to say, according to the Wikipedia definition, this “area of knowledge which concerns science and technology mainly from the angle of their impact on society”. Seguin’s texts are not addressed to us as to students in a science class; rather, they aim to make us citizens who know enough about the matter to manage their lives well. Seguin always spares us the learned sleeve effects, the jargon and the dizzying statistics to which he prefers the accessible and elegantly shot explanatory comments.
His criticism of the use of statistics, to assess the risks of having a disease, for example, is radical. He speaks of it as “the most flagrant perversion of scientific interpretation in the field of health” and concludes with “the almost absolute uselessness of these pseudoscientific data applied to individual cases”. Suffering from cancer in his sixties, Seguin, moreover, refused to say that he was fighting against this disease. “It happens,” he observed wisely.
A champion of scientific curiosity, driven by the “joy of knowing”, Seguin nevertheless invited researchers to be humble – simple answers are rare in this field – and journalists to sobriety. He made fun of the succession of star foods — vitamins, fiber, calcium, etc. — in the world of nutrition and “the vanity of wanting to fight against the irreversible disadvantages of old age”.
His refutation of the value of psychological tests to assess our intelligence or our normality and his rejection of the thesis of the heredity of intelligence are particularly gratifying. We would have liked to read it, today, on a controversial subject like ADHD, perhaps hastily explained by genetic considerations.
Seguin lamented the fact that “scientific culture constitutes a ghetto within culture”. He devoted his life to breaking this indifference and trying to convince Quebeckers that science is not “a confidential activity reserved for a few superior brains”, but “an exciting adventure of the human spirit”. I only met him after his death, thanks to this book, and he convinced me.
However, there is still work to be done in this direction today. Scientific culture, with its historical and social approach, remains the poor relation in our schools and in our mainstream media. The recent pandemic has shown the dangers to which such lack of culture exposes us. Caught between scholars obsessed with their specialty and often ignorant skeptics, we would have needed the wise and humble scientific culture of Mr. Seguin.