Maciej Giertych was born on March 24th, 1936 in Warsaw, Poland. He received a bachelor's and master's degree at Oxford University after which he spent his next four years as a graduate student at the University of Toronto. Maciej Giertych defended his PhD thesis in 1962 at which point he returned to Poland and began research at the Institute of Dendrology of the Polish Academy of Sciences. In 1970, he obtained his habilitation degree in forest genetics at the Poznań Agricultural Academy. In 1981, he was nominated associate professor and in 1989 became a tenured professor in forestry. He has lectured as a visiting professor in the Department of Biology at the University of Toruń (1976-1993) and at the Faculties of Forestry in Poznań (1966-1969, 1996-2001), Warsaw (1969 - 1990), and Kraków (1998 - 2001).He served on the Forest Sciences Committee of the Polish Academy of Sciences 1970-2007 and sat for two terms (1995-2000) on the Forestry Council of the Minister of Environment. He served on the editorial board of Silvae Genetica (1973-2001) and Annals of Forest Science (1990-2001). He authored 230 scientific papers. He represented Poland at the International Council of the International Union of Forest Research Organisations (IUFRO) from 1986 to 1995.
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While living in the UK and Canada, he was active in Polish émigré youth organisations. On return to Poland, he was active in consolidating traditionalists opposed to the communist system. He secretly distributed Polish-émigré right wing and conservative literature. He located unpublished historiosophical works of Feliks Koneczny, had them typed and transferred to his father in London to be published there. After 1989, they were republished in Poland. From 1986 to 1990, he served as a member and vice-chairman of the Roman Catholic Primatical Council of Cardinal Glemp, the Primate of Poland. He sat on the Consultative Council of the Chairman of the State as an opponent to the Communist regime from 1986 to1989. On the invitation of Pope John Paul II, he participated as a lay observer in the Synod of Bishops in Rome on the role of the laity in the Church in October 1987.
Since 1990, he has been politically active in the reactivated National Party, a pre-World War II conservative party, and has served as the Chairman of its Supreme Council (1990-2002). He was elected to the parliament (Sejm) in Poland from the League of Polish Families party list in 2001. In June 2004, he was elected to the European Parliament. Maciej Giertych is married to Antonina nee Jachnik and they have four children and twelve grandchildren.
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