Document(s) 6 of 9

Daemon Fairless

Watch and listen to the audio slideshow

Hometown: Toronto
Award: IDRC–Nature Science Journalism Award
Location: London, England and India

“I wanted to look at ways that basic technology could be applied to drastically improve people’s lives.” — Daemon Fairless

Daemon Fairless likes to connect dots: making sense of science to empower ordinary people. Born outside Edmonton, he grew up in Ottawa where he studied literature and psychology, hoping to understand what drives human behaviour. Then, after a year of bartending and writing “bad fiction,” he completed a master’s degree in neuroscience at Dalhousie University, with research on rats for testing new compounds to treat Alzheimer’s.

“Boring, nit-picky, detailed work,” Fairless recalls. But what troubled him was the way pharmaceutical research operated. His own research was publicly funded, but he came to believe that most of “the knowledge was benefiting drug manufacturers and was seldom shared.”

Journalism was a tool for sharing the wealth and connecting people with science, in Fairless’ view. So after his science degree, he went to journalism school and spent a few years practising his profession. Among other contracts, he helped produce the Discovery Channel documentary Body of Knowledge that explored the social history and science of the human body, and found work in Toronto as a producer with CBC Radio’s science program Quirks and Quarks. It was here that he heard about the IDRC–Nature Science Journalism Award.

Learning on the ground

He won the award with a proposal to write about India’s efforts to electrify rural villages using local energy sources, such as wind and solar power.

In April 2007 Fairless landed in London to begin the six-month fellowship with the British magazine Nature. In his first two months, he wrote news and went to Northern Spain to prepare a feature about wind farms.

The real work began in June, however, when Fairless touched down in New Delhi. Nature has no office there so he was on his own. The heat was oppressive and simple things like getting an Internet connection or basic background information proved difficult. Worse, his proposal about electrification proved unfeasible, as progress on this front was not yet sufficient to warrant coverage.

Nature gave him the green light to write other features: one on a biofuel harvested from a weed called jatropha; another about a controversial mega-proposal to connect India’s major river systems.

Rural problem-solvers, armed with IT

M.S. Swaminathan

His favourite piece, however, focused on one of India’s greatest heroes: Monkombu Sambasivan Swaminathan. In the 1960s and 1970s, the distinguished professor, now a senior government official, led a campaign to convince small rural farmers to plant new varieties of high-yield wheat. The resulting Green Revolution gave India food independence.

Now, the octogenarian Swaminathan is at the forefront of an equally ambitious movement to bring the Internet and telecommunications to India’s 600 000 rural villages (for more information).  As Fairless discovered in his research and interviews, the program has also established a National Virtual Academy (NVA) to train thousands of villagers (many of them women) to help meet their village’s information needs. IDRC is one of several NVA supporters.

Using a satellite link to the Internet, NVA graduates communicate with information officers at regional “knowledge hubs” to help fellow villagers obtain answers from reliable sources in government, universities, and businesses to urgent questions about crop diseases, health issues, government grants, and so on. The program is also sensitive to gender inequalities: its curriculum covers women’s health and micro-credit.

“It was beautiful that this man, an icon of [former President] Nehru’s faith in science and technology, really cared about helping poor women in rural India,” Fairless recalls. “Swaminathan is doing for information technology what he did for wheat.”

Honed skills, boosted confidence

When it came time to file his stories, the editors at Nature pushed him to do his best work. “They were exacting and intellectually engaging,” he says. “To have the opportunity to work for arguably the pre-eminent scientific journal in the world, as daunting as it was, was also incredibly important for developing my journalistic skills: my critical thinking, writing, and ability to chase down hard-to-find people, see big picture stories, and figure out how to make them accessible to a general readership.”

On returning to Canada, CBC Radio’s Quirks and Quarks offered him a full-time job as a producer. He now has the confidence to take on more ambitious projects — including, possibly, radio documentaries on the global food crisis and violence prevention.

Jim Boothroyd, the author of this profile, is a freelance writer based in Vancouver, BC.

See videos, slideshows, and articles about M.S. Swaminathan and IDRC support for his work

Document(s) 6 of 9