HIS NAME WAS DUBOIS JEROME XAVIER HARRIS, PH.D. THE FRENCH first name came from his Louisiana ancestors on his mother’s side. The Harrises were Canadian blacks whose ancestors had come up to Toronto during slavery. Jerome and Xavier were the names of saints—two of them, just to be on the safe side. The family straddled the border in the Detroit-Windsor area. Inevitably, he had been dubbed Doob by his friends at school when they had still been too young to understand that "doobie" was slang for a marijuana cigarette. The overwhelming majority of people called him Doc Dubois now, because he was on TV a lot, and that was how the talk show hosts and the network anchormen introduced him. His job on TV was to explain science to the general public and, as such, to act as a lightning rod for people who could not accept all the things that science implied about their worldview and their way of life, and who showed a kind of harebrained ingenuity in finding ways to refute it.