The most powerful force shaping society today is science applied by industry, medicine, and the military.【101】New scientific ideas and techniques pervade every aspect of our lives, changing the way we do things and how we perceive the world, thus altering our aspirations and notions of who we are, why we are here, and where we are going. Yet, with rare exceptions, scientists are virtually invisible in the popular media and in debates and reports on economic, social, and even environmental issues. As a geneticist and a journalist, I am constantly reflecting on the nature of the relationship between science and society.【102】 Here I recount the path that I have followed as a means to convey my experiences around, and opinions on, this complex relationship. My grandparents emigrated to Canada early in this century, driven from their homeland by terrible poverty. Both of my parents were born in Vancouver, British Columbia, as was I in 1936. 【103】Insulated from widespread racism and the plagues of the Great Depression by my parents and childish innocence, my earliest memories are of a happy childhood. On 7 December 1941, when Japan attacked Pearl Harbor, my life was changed forever. The racism that had festered in British Columbia ever since Japanese and Chinese began coming to the province in the late 1800s could now be vented openly under the guise of self-defense and patriotism. My family and I felt completely Canadian because we had never been to Japan, and at home English was our spoken language. In the months following Pearl Harbor, the Canadian government moved to control the feared treachery of its Japanese population by invoking the War Measures Act against all people of Japanese descent. 【104】The War Measures Act was a heinous piece of legislation that failed to recognize that while it is easy to guarantee civil rights and freedoms when times are good, those guarantees only matter when times are difficult. Twenty-two thousand Japanese, most Canadian citizens by birth, were rounded up and sent to internment camps in abandoned mining settlements deep in the Rocky Mountains. My father was separated from our family and shipped to a different camp for 1 year before being reunited with us. We were impoverished by the loss of our savings, our home, and almost all of our possessions. When the war drew to a close, we were expelled from British Columbia and my family ended up working as farmhands in southern Ontario. 【105】As a child I learned that hard work and a good education were the only means to extricate myself from this poverty. (81)