Françoise Baylis has never been shy about speaking her mind. And for the next few years, as the president of the Royal Society of Canada, she’ll be encouraging her academic peers to do the same.
Baylis, BA’83, is one of Canada’s most prominent bioethicists and a distinguished research professor emerita at Dalhousie University. She has served on the World Health Organization’s advisory committee on human-genome editing and has received some of this country’s top academic honours, including the Canada Council for the Arts Molson Prize and the Killam Prize.
She has also long been committed to sharing her knowledge as widely as possible. She has written dozens of op-ed pieces (for The Boston Globe, Le Monde, The Conversation and other publications) and has been interviewed countless times (by The New York Times, The Globe and Mail, CTV News and many others).
“I think it really starts with a core belief, which is, ‘who am I working for?’” says Baylis. A large chunk of the money that supports academic work in this country “is paid for from the public purse,” she says. “I think of the job of an academic almost as a vocation. In your little area [of expertise], you’re trying to contribute to making the world a better place.
“I’m confident there’s a lot of talent out there that can do the same kind of [outreach] work that I do that maybe hasn’t had that opportunity. I really want to spend the next three years in the role of president trying to create that opportunity for those who want it.”
“I think there’s only one real question, and that question is what kind of world do we want to live in? Once we’ve answered that, then it’s time to look at all the [science] and say, how will this help me build that world?”
Françoise Baylis, the president of the Royal Society of Canada
The Royal Society of Canada is well-known to the country’s academic community – but not so well-known to anyone who isn’t an academic. Being named a fellow of the society is a prestigious distinction, one that has been granted to more than 2,700 Canadian scholars, artists and scientists for their career accomplishments. In 2014, the RSC introduced the College of New Scholars and began paying tribute to a younger cohort. The college’s members “are young, they’re engaged, they’re on the cusp of making transformational contributions to society. That’s what they’ve been recognized for, their capacity to help change the world,” says Baylis.
Baylis says the RSC, which was first formed in 1882, has long played an influential role in this country. In its early years, the RSC helped support the creation of national institutions like the Canadian Museum of Nature, the National Research Council, and Library and Archives Canada. In more recent years, the RSC has contributed to major policy discussions. Its COVID-19 Task Force – a partnership with The Globe and Mail – organized town hall meetings, produced 100 op-eds, and released policy briefings about different aspects of the pandemic.
That’s the kind of public engagement that Baylis hopes to encourage as RSC president. Op-eds and media interviews are fine, but academics also need to consider other ways of sharing their knowledge. “The world is changing, and academia has to change too,” she says. “I want us to get better at using social media. I want us to reach out to people who have well-established blogs. I want people that have podcasts to see us, the members of the Royal Society, as interesting interlocutors. I want to find ways for us to communicate more broadly with audiences.”
Given the array of challenges that Canada is facing right now – economic, environmental, maybe even existential – Baylis is also encouraging the country’s decision-makers and policymakers to make better use of the wide range of expertise that RSC members and other academics in Canada have to offer. “We want to be in the rooms where [decisions are made],” says Baylis.
With the rise of misinformation and polarized viewpoints in recent years, many worry that the notion of expertise itself is under assault these days.
“I move in a lot of circles where people are talking about how are we going to build trust, and what are we going to do to counter this misinformation,” says Baylis. “And I think you just do it by doing it. You can’t just tell someone, ‘Trust me.’ You have to [put yourself out there], and people will see that you’re trustworthy. In my own work, I talk about trying to build consensus, and people sometimes tell me how Pollyannish I am. But then I remind them about all the times we’ve actually done it before. There is proof of concept.”
Baylis counsels academics to approach outreach activities with a degree of humility. “You have to be able to engage … in a way that isn’t just about advancing your pet project, but actually understanding that there can be legitimate reasons for people having different views about something.
“There are huge, broad conversations that we should be having in Canada. We need to open up people’s imagination,” says Baylis. “I think there’s only one real question, and that question is what kind of world do we want to live in? Once we’ve answered that, then it’s time to look at all the [science] and say, how will this help me build that world? How will AI help me build the world that I want to live in? How will synthetic biology help me build that world? How will [our] response to climate issues help me build the world that I want to live in?”
Baylis says that approach is particularly germane for the sorts of issues she deals with in her own work around reproductive technologies.
“I’m spending a lot of my time, at both the national and international level, working with organizations like the WHO, the OECD, UNESCO, and others, trying to have people pay attention to what might be possible in the realm of the modification of human DNA,” says Baylis.
Things are evolving quickly on that front – perhaps more swiftly than most of us recognize.
“We have two kinds of cells in the human body, somatic cells, which are most of the cells, and reproductive cells – sperm cells and egg cells. And those types of cells are very different,” says Baylis. “Scientists have succeeded in taking a somatic cell … and making sperm and eggs. If we can do that with a mouse, it’s only a matter of time before we figure out how to do it in a human. We could get to a point where we could make sperm and eggs from someone’s skin cells.
“So, again, you ask the question, ‘Is this a world I want to live in?’ And some people will say this is great because a same-sex couple could conceivably have children that are genetically related to both people. But then there are other people who are going to say, wow, this could be sending us down the eugenics path.
“My job is to say, let’s have a respectful conversation about this, so that we can all understand why we would want to either encourage this science or not.”
Baylis says her time at McGill helped pave the way for the career she has today, and she cites political philosopher James Tully as a particularly inspiring professor.
“I was in political science [at McGill], mostly doing political philosophy, but already I had determined that I was interested in this area called bioethics,” recalls Baylis. “At that time, there were no programs in bioethics. There just weren’t.” Baylis asked the teachers of her McGill courses if she could delve into bioethics themes – for a course on Eastern Bloc politics, for example, she wrote a term paper about abortion in Russia.
“[My professors] didn’t say, ‘No, this isn’t in the course curriculum, what are you doing?’ I very much experienced [McGill] as an institution that was willing to allow me to explore new ideas and new ways of thinking.”
