 Okay, so to begin the interview, could you please state your name? John Dutresar. And your age, please? 75. And where were you born? In Dunville, Ontario, near the Niagara Falls. And I guess at the time my father was a millwright working in the woolen cotton industry, which was based in Southern Ontario. It was the war and there was a lot of interest in blankets and sheets for uniforms and things of that type. So I guess about 1942, the family moved to Toronto where they worked in the woolen and cotton trade. And that's where I basically grew up in Toronto. I remember almost nothing about my life in Dunville. I was one or two, I guess two years of age when I left. And so growing up in the city, what were your hobbies or interests? I thought about that in the question and I really couldn't think of much. I remember as a public school playing sports, I was interested in that. Near the end I started to collect minerals. There were some interesting flow limestone deposits just beside our school in the Dawn Valley ravine. So I started collecting limestone imprints of leaves and twigs and whatnot and then went out in the country and looked for calcite crystals and celestine crystals in adjacent areas to see what I could find. So I guess I've been collecting minerals since that time. So that was sort of edging into the minerals industry from a very small way. Back before the Dawn Valley Parkway was developed. The Parking Lot has obscured a lot of sites there. And I guess I played sports. I remember we always played sports and there were the ravines where places where a lot of the boys went and collected natural artifacts, dead birds and all sorts of interesting things. So it's sort of a natural history background as well. And at school what were your strengths or again interests academically? Well in high school I guess my interests were in science and history in two strange dissimilar areas. And for a long time I thought of going into history actually. I was interested in medieval history and I took Latin for five years. Sort of an anticipation that I might do that. I realized that the profession of history was limited and the career opportunities were very narrow but they were much better on the scientific field. So then I was good in maths and chemistry and physics, natural history. We had in at that time the high school chemistry course was strongly biased towards metallurgy. It was the time when the iron ore deposits in Quebec were being developed. Kitimat in BC was an exciting aluminum breakthrough where they dammed mountain rivers and made aluminum. So there was a lot of interest in metallurgy at the time in addition to the gold deposits around the country. So I became interested in metallurgy and thought that was a career for me. It's neat to hear, you don't hear it very often that as of high school they kind of talk and educate about metallurgy. It was the chemistry of metal production. The electrochemistry part was electrorefining and electrowinning of metals. There were items on smelting, on iron reduction. It was just at the time and I know all of that's disappeared because I've seen my daughters and granddaughters chemistry curricula and they're quite different now. Perhaps a unique thing after the war where the metals industry in Canada was expanding. New smelters were being built, new refineries. Kid Creek was discovered a little after that. So it was a higher profile industry than it is now. I'd say now it's computers and electronics, high tech things seems to be here. That's right. So I'm guessing you went to university in that field? I enrolled in engineering, yes. And then moved into metallurgy I guess after the first year. In the second year there was an introduction to the area of engineering that you were interested in. So I had a metallurgical interest and again I found it intriguing that the chemistry complex interesting and it still is. So I'm involved now in rare earths to some extent and if there ever was an interesting and largely unknown chemistry it's rare earth chemistry. There are many aspects that haven't been extensively researched. So that's where I moved into metallurgical engineering at Toronto. Professor Pigeon was the department head at the time. I guess others have told you he's a bit of a character. He was always exciting and interesting to hear. So that's where I ended up for my undergraduate career. After that what would you consider having been your first job? I went to graduate school and got a doctoral degree. Right after? Right after a master's degree and then a doctoral degree with Professor Flengus in molten salt chemistry. And about that time Jim Tuguri moved from Noranda to the University of Toronto. And we got talking and he arranged for me to apply for a job at Noranda Research Center in Montreal. I went down and was accepted. And at the time Noranda Research had a research component. It had NRC funding to look into selenium chemistry and other areas. So I worked on that and I guess I'd been there about eight or nine months when they decided not to renew their NRC funding. And a lot of the scientific side of people departed for other jobs and I was one of them. So I went to work for the job at the Mines branch in Ottawa which is now Cannet Mining and that's where I spent 45 years. Working at Noranda did you ever work with Peter Tarasoff? Peter Tarasoff was the man I guess in charge of developing the Noranda reactor at the time. And Peter is a mineral collector as well. I don't know whether you know that but he has an excellent, particularly small micro-mountain collection of very, very fine minerals from alkaline complexes. So I knew Peter then and since I went to the Mines branch I see Peter at mineral shows occasionally. So he has relatives who live in Springfield, Massachusetts and the Springfield mineral show is one of the big East Coast mineral shows in August. So I see him there occasionally. Yeah, he was credited. There was a mineral named after him I think. Peter Tarasoff, which is found in I think in St. Hilaire actually. And Peter sent me two specimens from the type, the type boulder or whatever it was. So I know Peter quite well. I knew him well. I haven't seen him for a couple of years. But I know he's still the honorary mineralogy coordinator or curator at the Red Path Museum in Montreal. Yeah, when I interviewed him he mentioned the Red Path Museum quite a bit. And I understand he's done an excellent job in clarifying the nomenclature and sorting minerals out and putting things in order, which is something that Peter always did very well, very orderly person. So then working at CANMET, could you just explain, maybe kind of briefly go through your career there and maybe I'll stop you as we go. Okay. Well, as I said, my doctoral degree was on molten salt chemistry of zirconium and hafnium. I went to work at Miranda on chemistry of selenium, particularly the high-temperature chemistry of selenium and the selenides. And I was asked to go to the Mines Branch and I thought I would work on pyrometallurgy, but they wanted a hydrometallurgist. So I became an instant hydrometallurgist as I walked through the door there. And I worked on leaching of sulfide minerals, was the first project that I was involved with. And that carried on for a number of years, looking at copper sulfides, lead sulfides, zinc, silver minerals, many things to do with sulfide mineralogy. And that was really the initial thrust of my research at the Mines Branch. Okay. And so what kind of, what would you say throughout your career, whether done by you or having witnessed this, what would be the key hydrometallurgical developments that you'd seen happen in Canada throughout your career? Well, there's certainly a lot of them to do with uranium processing. At the time the Mines Branch was linked to El Dorado nuclear and the Elliott Lake uranium deposits and the Beaver Lodge deposit of El Dorado. And a lot of the chemistry was done there. And people, there was an exchange of people. They'd cut back on their staff and they'd moved to the Mines Branch and then they'd go back to El Dorado and there was an exchange of technologies there dealing with leaching, with solution purification by ion exchange and solvent extraction. Gord Ritsi was one of the, I don't know how to interview Gord. Next Monday. Next Monday. He was involved in a lot of your early uranium work there and developed uranium technologies. I guess he has patents in the area. And that sort of moved him into the area of waste treatment, tailings management, where I don't know quite what the link was, but that's what happened. And then he and Alan Ashbrook wrote two books on processing and I think Gord actually did most of the writing there. So Gord would explain more about that for you. But that was certainly one. There was the development of the early uranium work. Another area, I guess, of interest was pressure hydrometallurgy. That came out and there was a legal dispute as to who had developed pressure leaching for nickel ores, whether it was Frank Forward, UBC or Ken Downs at CanMet. And Frank Forward won the case with Sharrett, won the case in part because the government backs out of every time there's a dispute with the private sector, they backed out. But certainly CanMet was involved in pressure hydrometallurgy very early. And I think Sharrett did an awful lot of work to develop that technology into commercial realities for nickel, uranium, they have a copper process. And that was certainly one of the developments in Canada has been this creation of a pressure hydrometallurgy expertise with Sharrett and with other companies as well. And that led them into the first zinc pressure leach process of trail at the time was Kaminko. And they then expanded into Hudson Bay and into Kidd and then other overseas places as well. I think many of the overseas places are closed but it's still actively involved and actively used in Canada. Okay, just one moment. Okay, so could you explain the pressure leaching kind of in layman's terms? Okay, what happened in say the zinc industry before was that the zinc occurs as a zinc sulfide mineral and it was basically burnt in air to form zinc oxide and sulfur dioxide. And there have been times when the sulfur dioxide if it's made into acid there were problems selling the acid. The price was very low and it didn't cover shipping costs at times. So the idea was that if you could leach that using air or oxygen pressure at say 100 degrees or 150 degrees then you would make elemental sulfur. And the advantage of the elemental sulfur is it could be recovered or it could be stored or it could be dumped into the tailings pond with the other sulfides. So it provided a means of separating zinc production from acid production if you wanted to do that. And at times that's been a very attractive option and at other times when the price of acid is high it's not an attractive option. But I think that was the underlying thrust of it. There had been a great deal of work trying to do it at say 100 or 110 degrees under a pressure, high air pressure or high oxygen pressure. And the problem was that you would not get complete reactions of the zinc. That's the elemental sulfur that formed would coat the particles and inhibit the reaction. And I think it was actually the Japanese who first found that Krabacho and Lingdon sulfonate dispersed the sulfur and allowed the reaction to continue. And then Sherrod applied that to pressure leaching at about 150 degrees. They were able to achieve 99% zinc recoveries. The elemental sulfur was separated. Tech, trail operations, they recovered the sulfur. At Hudson Bay I think it just goes into the tailings bond. And at Kid Creek when they operated it was just dumped into the tailings bond where it gradually oxidized along with the other sulfides that were there. But that's the essence of it. And one time Sherrod very actively promoted the sale of that but I think that's perhaps lesser so now than in the past. Okay. Now throughout your career, and this is often the most, the question people find the most difficult, but has there been a certain project or part of your career that you would deem as dysfunctional? Something that sticks out as having been a very dysfunctional? People who work for the government say the entire organization is dysfunctional at times but not really. There have been times when things seem to be going off in all directions simultaneously. They haven't been well coordinated. As a researcher what I've always done is I've always sort of mapped out my research avenue and regardless of how the others are changing their minds I have more or less continued along the path that I set for myself initially. So I haven't really seen a dysfunctional group. Certainly there are I guess in some companies the management interferes to an extensive extent and things don't work but that's not been my experience at can that be? Do you have projects at times where you work on something and the plans change or it's kind of what your research has to be I guess discarded and you have to move on to something else? That has happened a number of times. One of the projects I had when I first started the CanMet was to measure the reaction of metals in sulfur vapor and selenium vapor for my interest in pyrometallurgy and it involved sealing a metal coupon on a silica glass spring and the weight change would be measured by the extension of the spring and you had to heat everything so that the sulfur or the selenium was at the coldest part of the system and that generated the vapor pressure so then that work went on quite well for about five or six years and then the management decided that wasn't going any place and thought I should discontinue it so I did. I finished off the study that I was currently doing and didn't go back to it. It was of interest for high temperature gas turbines, jet engines where they have sulfidation from sulfur in the fuels that they were working with. I gather that problem has been resolved to some extent but that was when they stopped. We had other projects on thiosaults where we had an industry, government university team working on it. We thought we had solved the problem and then the industry said it was no longer a concern so it stopped. That's happened from time to time and we accept that. At CanMet we've always been allowed to finish off what was ongoing, take six months to finish it off so it allowed us to wrap things up more or less completely but that happens. I know it happens in industry much more abruptly where somebody just says this isn't economical, stop it today and they do. Often without good justifications in my experience they tend to base a lot on maybe one or two pilot, simple test when maybe if they'd done further test work they would have been able to make it work but that was their management's decision and they had to abide by it. What has been some of your most significant work at CanMet? Looking back what would you say has been your favorite or most important work? I think the leaching of the sulfide minerals was certainly the initial work and it carried on maybe for on and off for 25 or 30 years. It resulted in some early review articles in the South African review journals in Canadian, American review journals outlining the work that had been done on sulfide leaching looking at the processes. That I thought was one we think we found an interesting observation in that when you discuss sulfide leaching in theory everyone says the sulfur forms a uniform layer on the sulfide mineral and as soon as we started to look at it microscopically you see that's not the case at all that the sulfur forms in discrete sites it certainly changes your way of looking at the mechanism. We started to see well formed faceted sulfur crystals when we were leaching that convinced us that the sulfur was dissolving as hydrogen sulfide gas and then was being oxidized at certain sites to form either globules or in some cases sulfur crystals. So that work we worked on it for a long time and then got out of that field but others carry on. Sulfide leaching is still the holy grail of metallurgy if you can do it at 100 degrees you know you avoid smelting altogether people see some advantages to it but the smelting industry has changed as well and it's made many improvements over the years so smelting still remains the most attractive way to do it if you can get rid of the acid I think that's the key step. Is that related to your leach recycling work when you talk about sulfide leaching? No, I remember that leach recycling I don't know exactly what you meant by leach recycling we worked on one of the later projects I worked on was on recycling we were involved with the recycling society here and the European Union recycling groups we never did a lot of work on recycling we had characterization work on some recycled products but my involvement there was more organizational organizing conferences, bringing people together from the European Union, from Vietnam, Japan talking about recycling we gave a few papers on the Canadian recycling industry at overseas conferences but I was never a major force in recycling Now you mentioned rare earth and how lately you've been doing more work on rare earth was that with CANMET? I retired about four or five years ago I was an emeritus scientist for three years and at the time rare earths were just starting to be studied at CANMET and I offered to stay on as an emeritus scientist under certain conditions the CANMET would not meet those conditions at the time at the conference in Toronto and just thereafter I was approached to see whether I would come back as a part-time worker to initiate some studies on rare earths so in November of last year I rejoined CANMET as a part-time worker and I started to do some work on rare earths looking at, I guess, the department of rare earths during the precipitation of impurities and looking at, to a lesser extent, on oxalate precipitation I'm just starting on rare earths It's pretty interesting from what I hear that I just interviewed Jenna Zink I'm guessing you know who was also just starting to work on rare earths for CANMET CANMET received, I think, $25 million thereabouts over five years to encourage research on rare earths and part of it, or good part of it is being done via contracts to people outside to look at literature reviews and certain technologies things that CANMET would have done itself a few years ago but now it's had so many reductions in staff and resources it has to contract them out but CANMET itself is undertaking research in mineralogy flotation, leaching, precipitation, and impurity department and finally the environmental control largely thorium, I guess, in the residues but all of that started about a year ago and I think this April will be one year into the five-year contract and as I think I mentioned earlier, rare earth chemistry is complex there are many things that are not known about it until recently rare earths were not a priority element they've suddenly become so and people are starting to work on them but you don't have that, you know, 100-year backlog you have a sulfide leaching where people have been looking at it on and off for the last century or so but it's getting a lot of attention and it's becoming quite useful especially for renewable technologies they showed, we had a short course in Ottawa and they showed the price of the rare earths and they were relatively flat and then the Chinese announced restrictions the price went up like that and then the Chinese dropped their restrictions and the price is back down more or less where it would have been so I think there was a lot of interest at the time much of that interest has disappeared and the price, of course, has fallen dramatically for the rare earths, most of them so I don't know what the future will be on that whether there's really a place for a Canadian rare earth industry or not time will tell because apparently there is potential well there are many rare earths that they tell you are not rare they're all over the world and certainly Canada has a number I think any place that has a large pre-Cambrian granite base type thing will have all sorts of rare earth deposits the Russians must have them, the Australians do so they're certainly not rare and it's a question of who can develop them most cheaply and get into the market first and establish control of the market the Chinese have 90 some percent of the market now and they'll be very difficult to displace Now if we move on a bit more to a few social questions you're known for having continuously promoted cooperation between the industrial and academic communities so what initiatives were taken to accomplish this and what work have you done in that regard? Well, over the years I've put together a number of industrial working groups I've had industrial groups in copper refining copper electrotining zinc processing smelting and thiosalts and these have been initiated through CANMAC back in the time when CANMAC supported that type of work we went out and they all started as a Canadian group I know the copper refining group we had the three Canadian copper refiners I approached the people and asked them if they would be willing to get together and discuss their problems informally they were willing to do so one or two were reluctant we bought in a couple of academic people from time to time to make presentations to the industrial people and CANMAC itself where it was working in the area would give talks as well those meetings were... people were reluctant at first they were afraid they were going to give away trade secrets but it turns out that the industry has a number of common problems that are not proprietary things like keeping pumps pumping and filtration and all sorts of things that one company solves part of the problem and another company solves another part and it turned out that once they got together and started presenting what they were doing on a theme topic for that meeting it proved to be quite attractive and then we started to hear from companies in the United States who were interested in joining and they did and then we heard from companies in South America who wanted to join a good means of distributing information there were no lawyers in the room people just talked informally and then they'd have a lunch and a dinner and you could get together with somebody and go into great depth about what alloy resisted that solution for the best what do you use we use this so that worked quite well for copper equally well for zinc processing at the time Canada had I guess four zinc plants it now has three but certainly what with the development of pressure leaching here and the size of the Canadian operations it provided a good foundation and then it moved into the States and then of course the American industry all but disappeared the American zinc industry all but disappeared so but that was the sort of thing that happened smelting was more a little more difficult because each smelting industry has different interests and different focuses so that what was a concern of the copper industry wasn't always of concern to the lead industry or the nickel industry but it lasted that lasted for oh maybe ten years before can met for financial reasons said something had to be cut that was the one I cut and there was work as well that wasn't just industry that wasn't just companies there was also schools involved certainly the thiosalt project involved the number of academic people who were looking at things like oxygen solubility, novel oxidants items of that type we always invited some suppliers occasionally to the copper and zinc movie meetings there were some academics Dave Dreisinger who I suppose is on your list he attended a number of the meetings Tom Hoake from the states who died a few years ago but he attended many of our meetings so we had an academic representation we tried to avoid involving graduate students in their research we were looking for the professor who sort of gave an overview of what was going on in his labs and related to what was going on in the industry so that seemed to work moderately well was another question I always ask throughout the interviews and that's the question of the presence of women and throughout your career you've mostly worked at can met but throughout your career have you seen an increase in women what was the presence when you started when you retired? I remember in undergraduate career in engineering I think in chemistry they had maybe two or three hundred students I think there were two women in the class so they were very rare in engineering much more common in chemistry more chemistry than physics when you got into biochemistry there was a greater percentage of female students that changed when I went to random research there were a number of women technologists or scientists or technologists I don't think any of them were in managerial positions but there were certainly a number in the chemical laboratory doing work in the labs and in the pilot plant can met I guess there would be some at the time I joined there are now a great many a great many and in part because there have been government they call them targets or objectives but it turned out to be almost quotas I think people feel you have to hire so many whatever groups being promoted there are now a large number of female scientists managers, Janice Sink being one technician certainly a large number of female technicians so they have been a growing growing number when you go to a conference now it is quite common maybe a third of the room is female students and engineers whatever definitely more today more women in school than there were back in the day people I think one Nobel prize warrior got in trouble for saying that when you hire a woman scientist the first thing she is married, has children and has to leave and there is an element of truth in that that the burden of family life falls mostly on the mother I think so she is not able to spend the amount of time that perhaps a male could on the topic but that obviously varies true and it is changing whereas the man is taking more and more of these responsibilities but yeah it is still I wrote an article not that long ago it is still statistically true that it is women that quit their jobs half way through their careers in the middle of their careers much more than men and that is the main reason why another question is do you think there is a large disconnect or not between the natural resource industry and the general public and if so why okay as I mentioned when I got into the business 45 years ago that the resource industry was seen as a high profile very positive it was making jobs export earnings all the positive things were being emphasized I think since then there has been more emphasis on the negative aspects the pollution the tailings dam failures affluent waste leaching into the water the fact that they have become tremendously capital intensive and yet much of the capital is spent outside the country for equipment and parts and what not that problem is worse for third world countries where I think they are starting to realize that the billion dollar project involves 900 million spent outside the country to buy things but certainly the public's perception of the industry has changed I think the pollution problems that it has you know these spills they are well publicized now maybe in the past they were just of local interest now they make the headlines across the country so that's changed the industry treats its people from the public point of view badly there are massive 12,000 people laid off or this sort of thing large layoffs that sort of thing changes the perception of the industry and you think as well on the industry side do you think they also have a disconnect with the general public to some extent the industry has become very focused on making money I used to think that the copper industry was interested in making copper I now realize that was naive they are interested in making money and lots of it there is this growing perception that greed is the dominating factor people start to hear about the bonuses that people are making and the profits they make and then they have to lay off cut 500 jobs or something and they don't really make that connection the companies realize now they need social license to continue so they go through the motions of what they have to do but I think there are people who will say do they really believe in communicating with those involved or is it just a formal exercise you hold three meetings with the aboriginal people and you go ahead and do what you are going to do anyway so there is that conflict between the public and the industry the other part is that for much of the country the industry is a very minor component of the gross domestic product locally it is very important in a mining town it is very important but across the nation it is of much lesser importance than it was 50 years ago I believe ok thank you next question is it is a mouthful but there is no wrong answer it is really in your opinion so here I go in your opinion are there any events people, inventions, contributions anything really that you deem must be mentioned when discussing the history of the natural resources in Canada and specifically more of the mining metallurgy petroleum side of it well I mentioned the work that Sherrod has done on promoting pressure hydro metallurgy that would be one the other one although it is not in my area is the flash smelting technique and bath smelting technique that was developed by INCO initially well I guess Walter Kerlog and people like that were involved in developing that and then the Miranda flag continuous smelting process was another one those I think were at the leading edge of technology at the time they were using tonnage oxygen to conserve energy to conserve fuel and the Utukumpu process sort of developed in parallel for some reason the Utukumpu process has been marketed much more widely than the INCO process but I think INCO was one of the innovators there must have been the late 40s early 50s the Miranda technique was really developed in the early 60s I guess it has been picked up by the Chileans you know with their own smelting technology a teniente converter but the use of tonnage oxygen and smelting would have been one rather than any others there must be there must be the aluminum industry I know they made innovations into bipolar cells very energy efficient cells they have not been implemented and they are still using the old Hall-Harrou cell and I think Peixine has pioneered the leader in that area from France Magnesium at one time Canada had the pigeon Magnesium process which was innovative I spent a summer working in the pigeon plant at the Ottawa Valley here and they were quite proud of the fact that the pigeon plant to China and that turned out to be the downfall of the North American industry because the Chinese took the technology expanded it used it wisely with their low labor costs and dominate the Magnesium market today but that was something that was developed in Canada and I guess just after the war you had mentioned the I guess the business of China a recurring answer I get with this question is the disappearance of the Canadian companies Canadian names what do you think of that and working for CANMET did that affect you you guys there it's ironic that all of those takeovers have all been passed through our department to see if there was a net benefit to the country maybe I shouldn't say this now that I'm a part-time employee but there was a number of the technical people who said there were no advantages to Canada from those takeovers however at the higher level the takeovers were approved and I I think it's a tragedy because your profits as in everything the country is being sold off piecemeal in manufacturing and metals and retail restaurants everything foreign chains the disadvantage is that the profit leaves the country and then somebody outside the country decides where and how to invest that I think back to the cobalt silver camp where some people made a great deal of money that money was reinvested in Canada in part developing the Timmins gold areas that doesn't happen when U.S. steel owns the old Stelco works if they make money it goes to Pittsburgh and they decide what they will spend it on and whether they'll invest in China or somewhere else that's one problem with that you also have decisions about closing things made overseas I know when Extrata took over they promised there would be no job cuts for three years I think shortly after three years Miranda Technology Center was merged with Vulcan Bridge Technology Center so there are many negative aspects to that and perhaps not many positive ones that's that's what I hear it's recurring through these interviews and it's almost all gone tech is an exception tech still processes here which is partly foreign owned I think half but partially foreign owned but it imports Cuban material and makes metals here in Canada so it's at least half a Canadian company doing quite well the big gold producer Barrett mines much of its gold outside the country it's in Toronto I guess for tax tax reasons I don't know well that's where it was established in Toronto so it hasn't moved with Peter Monk but yeah, no other than that you look at Stelco Fasco, Stelco Algoma Steel Vulcan Bridge Alcan sold to Rio Tinto Beck Iron Antenium sold to Rio Tinto do you think eventually it would change? it matches the industry it's very cyclical or no? no I don't think that's going to change the reason being that the government seem willing to allow the country to be sold off piecemeal I've just seen the big Canadian one remaining big Canadian hardware company Rona has been sold to Lowe's so the hardware industry in Canada is now dominated by American companies which buy American tools American supplies so it's a I don't see it changing unless there's a political will to stop doing that but you have the Prime Minister and others running around looking for an investment somebody to come in and buy something the low value of the dollar makes it cheap for them to buy and our banks will lend them the money at low rate to buy it so I don't see it changing your future just a few closing questions this question more what we can divide it into what are you proudest of in life we could say in life but we could also say professionally in your professional career Bernie Sanders said his greatest achievement was he'd been married for 27 years and had two or three children I've been married for 47 years and have two children as well so I guess that certainly has been something that's unusual these days when you're at a table everyone's talking about their second wife, their third wife their fourth wife I wonder where I've gone wrong at times anyway that's certainly something that's been beneficial to me it's provided a stable base which has allowed me to work I can work till 6 o'clock and go home and dinner is ready and my wife doesn't complain if I have to read something after dinner so that's been one successful thing I guess the other is I suppose scientifically I think it would be the work done on applied mineralogy which was something that started in Minds Branch at the time where people started to use looking at residues and concentrates to try to explain what is happening in the process and with people like Dr. Chen who is my colleague for a number of years Louis Cabri we collectively use that technique to look at metallurgical reactions to see what is going on I mentioned the business of sulfur not coating not forming a uniform coating and there are all sorts of cases where you look at it and what you think what the company thinks is happening what you initially think is happening isn't it something quite different when you actually look at it with high resolution magnification so that's been a minor success what else some of the work we did on zinc processing with applied mineralogy iron precipitation which is an area I worked on for a number of years dealing with rare earths we're looking at rare earth deportment in iron precipitates that's been a factor feature for me over the years I've met a lot of people who have been very very helpful who have been a pleasure to work with who have tried to cooperate I've cooperated with them and they with me and we tried to get things done many of those sort of worked into at least a business type friendship where you go out with people and travel with them occasionally and that was certainly enjoyable not all of the people you meet fall into that category there are some you'd rather forget about but I think that's true anywhere I was just going to say that so anyway those those are the sort of things that I would look upon as sort of a career last question and it's one of my favorites if you were to speak to someone much younger like a student for example what would be the one life lesson or piece of advice you would give them regarding their career you could also look at it as a career and maybe the natural resources but it could also just be about their future in general I have students working with me what do you think I should do and my comment is usually to provide a sound grounding because what you learn in university or certainly in high school by the time you're ready to apply it it will be obsolete so what is important is that you understand what is happening you learn certain techniques to look certain ways of looking at problems you know how you break them down you know how students address one after another sort of a logical approach to problems I tell them that's the way they should do it the other thing I tell them to do is to write up what you do because there's nothing even for the students we have if you do a little little piece of research it's fine but to do a little piece of research and write it up as an internal report or something for your next position it shows within the organization where you're working that you've actually done something that you're able to explain it and write it up so if you decide to stay with that organization it's a step in the right direction you decide to leave it's something that you can point to I did this and this is the report that describes it so that's one thing I urge them to do is to document what they've done helps you remember what you've done too well I can tell my age that becomes increasingly important good advice is there anything else you'd like to add no not really as I say I'd like to see this sort of thing put into a form where it would be attractive to people but I don't really know how you're going to do that you say you have a hundred sixty people yeah we're aiming for minimum seventy we're in the sixties right now so if you take say seventy people even times five minutes it's six hours of viewing time and no one is going to take six hours to view that type of documentation so I don't know whether you'd be better to take smaller component select certain people because at a conference I saw a conference in Quebec City this is the sort of thing you could show on a television screen near registration but it has to be catchy nobody's going to sit for six hours so if you had maybe four or five people with two or three minutes each perhaps and then just asking what you think you're for a conference like that would you prefer seeing these few minutes of these few people talking about necessarily their scientific work or would you also like to see their social their question about their social answers or their personal experiences things like that what would you find interesting or what would you think would be catchy in a conference like that I think depending on the individual it could be any of those you had someone who had an interesting experience and was a very talented speaker that type of thing would go over it's the sort of thing you could have say at the hydro metallurgy has a luncheon if you had an historical metallurgy has a luncheon it's the sort of thing where you could show that for maybe five minutes you'll get three people there bang bang bang that would hold people's attention and would be informative and you could also note that the complete program is available wherever it is on our website yeah, excellent the scientific part I don't think you'd interest science has become so fragmented and specialized if you're talking about this 99% of the people are going to be interested in something else and that's why the oral history aspect of it is neat because no matter what you've done in your career you quite often can come out of this with an interest in anecdote or historical, we worked on historical metallurgy for a long time with Pathy Habashi I guess you've interviewed Pathy in Toronto actually at the conference so he, myself, Arthur Dunn there's been a number of people involved in historical metallurgy trying to get the Canadian aspect and Peter Terrissoff was always keen that we should do Canadian developments whereas Pathy tends to use European developments so Peter was always very keen on that and that I found intriguing it's a very short history to Chinese or European even American metallurgy it's a very short history but it has some interesting components in it so that would be a place to show some of this I suppose pictures wouldn't do anything just stagnant pictures you'd need a television screen with somebody there at your museum when it was open I used to go there with the children and grandchildren and I found that people would watch the television screen for about two minutes no matter how interesting it is they're just in and out sort of thing and it's getting more and more like that part of the trouble is there's so much like that now television has all sorts of nature shows people are inundated with type of information so I see the time span the focus span is very short it is so that's why I had mentioned going for the snippets snippets which I've done a few compilations so far some of more of the motive parts of these interviews others with different perspectives on that so that's what I'm looking to do for the