 Okay, so we're about to begin an interview with Dr. David Dresinger, and it is September 12th, Thanksgiving. October 12th. Sorry, October 12th. Thank you. Thanksgiving, exactly. Yeah. We are in Ottawa at the Science and Tech Museum, and the interviewer, as usual, will be William McCrae. So let's begin. So could you please state your full name? My name's David Bruce Dresinger. And your age? I'm 57 years old this year. Yeah. And where exactly were you born? I was born in Sudbury, Ontario, the nickel capital of the world. Yeah, very fitting for the interview. Yeah, very. And as a child, what did your parents do? My father had kind of a dual career. He was a forester. He worked first half of his career in the provincial government in the Department of Environment, looking at the effect of sulfur dioxide pollution from the smelters on vegetation. And then halfway through his career, he actually switched to work for INCO and did the same sort of thing, working with INCO, helping them understand better the impact of their operations on forests and crops and that sort of thing and predicting what was happening with the pollution in the Sudbury area. What years would have that been? I think he finished his career in the 1980s. So it would have been sort of from the 50s till the 80s in that timeframe. Still pretty early to see, I guess, kind of a more environmental aspect to the... He was actually one of the very first starting in government and then migrating into the company itself. One of the very first to start to look at that. As a kid, I can remember traveling around to different sites around the Sudbury region and even as far away as Wawa where they had little pollution monitoring sites set up, where they'd measured the pH of rainfall and any sulfur dioxide that actually got to the ground level would be detected by these monitors. So it was kind of a nice visual of what was happening with the area at the time growing up. Yeah, so you would have been right in the middle of that as a child. What did you do as a past timer for fun? I was an outdoors fish natto. I'd left a canoe and fish and all those sorts of things. Northern Ontario is fantastic for that. So we spent a lot of time doing that in my youth. Okay, and did you develop any kind of passion or interest for any form of sciences early on? I had a passion for math. I had a really good math teacher in high school named Mr. Savage who was quite an influence on me. He was my teacher all the way through high school in an advanced math class. Then I really enjoyed physics and chemistry and bio to a somewhat of a lesser extent, but definitely chemistry, physics and math were the three big ones. And so from high school on, what was going to be your path in life? Did you know as a high schooler? I didn't know. I had an older sister who dated an engineer, and he seemed to really like what he did. And so when I got to the end of high school and thought, what am I going to do with math, chemistry and physics as my background? I thought, well, Steve seems to like it. I think I'll do it as well. So I went off to Queens and did engineering. That was my choice. I applied to different schools, but got accepted and went to Queens. And so I kind of stumbled into engineering a little bit. And then at the end of first year at Queens, he had a choice of going into one area or the other, kind of a general first year and then choosing coming out of first year going into second year. And I went to the metallurgy department as one of the open houses during the first year and found a lot of common interests there and thought, yeah, that sounds pretty interesting. I think I'm going to choose that and just basically chose that subject of the time. So no great sort of epiphany when I was eight years old and like that. It was more of an evolution and continues to be so. As it is with most people, for sure. So at university, were there any specific, very specific classes or I guess even specializations that you really loved or vice versa? Yeah, you know, I probably enjoyed more the extractive side of metallurgy. So when I was being taught there was sort of physical metallurgy which was more steel alloys and aluminum alloys and the different uses of metals rather than the extraction of metals. And I got more interested in the extractive side. I had one course in hydro metallurgy which became my career interest which was probably the most interesting course I had in third year. And that sort of directed me and the professor that was teaching that class he ended up becoming my PhD supervisor. So we kind of tracked that in that direction. So early interest in about third year and that carried on through grad school and through the whole career. Did you go directly into grad school and then PhD? I started in masters right after a bachelor's and then at Queens you're allowed to do a transfer from master's to PhD if you did well enough in the first year masters and I was fortunate enough to do that so I didn't have to get a master's and just went right to the PhD. Nice. And so what was the PhD? What was the thesis? It was on cobalt nickel separation. So I actually had some summer employment with INCO at the research center after my fourth year. So finishing a bachelor's did a summer employment and then came back to school for the master's and during that summer employment they said, well why don't you do a thesis that's in line with our interests so we decided to do something on cobalt nickel separation because at that time there were new chemicals that were coming out that were very good at separating those two metals which in history have been quite difficult to separate and so one of these chemicals was selected as the topic of my thesis. It's called a phosphonic acid solvent extraction chemical which allowed cobalt to be recovered away from nickel from a solution and so that became the heart of my thesis. Understanding the chemistry and the rates at which this chemical separated different metals became the topic of my thesis. And so afterwards what would you consider your first official job in the field? Well I went to UBC where I still am in 1984 and had a one-year post-doctor fellowship appointment. So that was my first job coming out of my PhD. I literally finished I think on August 25th my PhD defense at Queens in 1984 and then started at UBC on the 1st of September so it was a very rapid transition. It was a couple of days late for my first day at work driving across the country but started for the one year and then of course that continued on into other positions at UBC where I still am some 30, I guess 31 years later. So you've taught most of your life, you've been a prof, right? I have, yes. My main job has always been to be a professor at the university and I've always had other interests as well and other roles and positions with different companies but I've always been a professor over that period. What were your other roles? We'll get into the teaching and the work at the university but what other roles have you done throughout your career? Well in the mid-1990s there was a lot of interest in Vancouver is a very interesting place because it's filled with companies that do exploration and develop new mineral properties and there were a lot of companies locally that were finding properties that needed metallurgical expertise to help them develop. So I started to do a lot of consulting in the 1990s after I became a professor at UBC and some of those consultancies then evolved into officer positions or director positions with companies where they asked me to formally take a role. It was still a consultancy type role, not a full-time role but it became a vice president of metallurgy or vice president of processing or a director of a company so that sort of thing took place over that period of time. Now you've done quite a bit of work in I guess one of your interests is technology development but also technology transfer. Can you talk a bit about that? Yeah, one of the passions at UBC over the many years has always been on technology transfer, development and transfer. So our building at UBC is called the Frank Ford Building. Frank Ford was kind of a pioneer in technology development and transfer in hydrometallurgy at the university. His experience was to work with the Sherrick Gordon Mines back in the 1950s. They discovered a mine in Manitoba that was full of nickel. They didn't have a way to recover it. The other nickel companies at the time weren't willing to buy their concentrate so there's no way to take their mineral and get it into metal without developing something of their own. And so Frank Ford cooperated with the Sherrick Gordon Company at the time and developed the ammonia leaching process for nickel sulfides which became the heart of the Sherrick Company as it still stands today. And so starting with Frank Ford, Frank Ford's student was a fellow named Ernie Peters. He was my mentor when I first went to UBC. He spent his whole life working interactively with industry, developing ideas and technologies and trying to transfer them and then that's continued through my career afterwards. So I was sort of mentored into that role and really thrived in it after Ernie retired. Okay, so that's a specific technology transfer you're still working on or are there many... No, I've had a lot of different things that I've worked on over the years. I don't know if you'd like me to talk about them in general. Yeah, or go with the ones you're proudest of. Yeah, so the ones I'm probably most proud of are ones that relate to copper and nickel and precious metal recovery. So going back again to the 1990s, one of the companies that approached me to help them with a problem was a company called Aberphole Minerals out of Australia and they just discovered a very high-grade copper deposit in Queensland and Australia. They were trying to recover the copper effectively but couldn't do so by conventional mineral processing and so they said, well, can you help us develop a hydrometallurgical process for it? And we developed one of the world's first low-temperature, low-pressure autoclave processes for copper. So we were able to actually leach the copper directly from the ore under conditions that had never been used before, put all the copper, or almost all the copper in solution and then recover it by solvent extraction and electrolysis to make copper cathode, which is the final form of copper that was recovered. And that plant started in 1998 and ran for about five years till the ore was exhausted and recovered about 50,000 tons a year of copper over that period and was one of the real technical successes of my career. That's gone on. I've actually worked with a couple other deposits of similar type. There was a mine up in, or still is a mine up in Laos in Asia which had very similar ore to the one in Australia. Again, we developed a technology for that ore. It had to be a little bit different. We ran an open tank leach rather than a pressure leach at that plant and then recovered some of the waste minerals and converted those to acid and reagents to feed the rest of the plant. So we had a nice process development, a nice US patent again that was issued for the technology and that started up in 2005 and has been running ever since and now recovers about 90,000 tons a year of copper at that plant, not bad. So we've had a couple of successes like that and the one that's still pending, which actually predates both the previous examples but because of delays in financing and permitting and all the other things that take place when you develop a mineral property, it's still pending as development. There's a technology called the Platzol process which is kind of a marketing name for a technology that does direct extraction of copper, nickel, cobalt, platinum, palladium, gold, silver and other metals as well if they're present. But that technology was developed on behalf of a company called Polymet Mining in Minnesota and it's still at the cusp of permitting success. We're hoping the next very short while to have our final environmental impact statement published but Platzol was developed to directly extract all those different metals from the ore in Minnesota. It's a very complex ore. A company's called Polymet because of the polymetallic nature of the ore and we're hoping to get our permits and put that into production fairly soon. How long has it been pending? I think the process was developed in 1998. So it's 17 years going on. I think the patents are going to expire before the process is actually commercialized which is interesting. Now if you go back to Australia or Laos, how common is that in the world that there are ores that you need this specific type of extraction? How common is that? I think I would say that each of those different ores are fairly unique. The ore in Australia has a direct analogue in Spain. There's an ore in Spain that's been developed by InMet which is now part of first quantum mining from Canada. That ore is very similar to the one in Australia and they developed a process that had some elements of similarity for the one in Spain. I'm involved in that one as well. I was involved with InMet and now currently with first quantum. But a lot of these deposits are one-off deposits. They're unique creations of nature and you have to look at them very carefully and decide how best to approach them. So it's really hard to get a one-size-fits-all technology in the hydromet space. You always have different minerals present, different waste products that might be generated, different local environmental conditions. Varieties that present. So you've really got to be quite careful about how you select and develop technology. That reminds a new puzzle, essentially. They are and they're fun from that perspective. It's like a new crossword on Sunday morning. It's a different challenge to present itself. So those all would become technically different patents? Yes, that's correct. So the patent from Australia was issued first and then the one in Laos second while the other one from 1998 or so. I think it was maybe issued in the early 2000s but filed in 1998. And I should have mentioned that that was a technology developed with SGS Minerals in Lakefield, Ontario or the fellow named Chris Fleming. And also my consulting comrade Terry O'Kane is now deceased. Terry, Chris and I collaborated on that development for that plot-solve process. So how many patents have you been involved with or patents and inventions? I think I've got about 19 U.S. patents and of course a lot of those are patented in other countries as well. But I don't count those as separate patents because they're all the same patent just filed in a different jurisdiction. But about 19 inventions altogether. And do they all involve extracting different mixtures of minerals from the earth? Yes, they're all related to mining and metals processing for sure. Some are related to control of impurity elements and processing. So one of the things I worked on over the years is looking at trying to get elements like antimony and bismuth away from copper which is a common problem in copper refining. So one of the collaborations was with an Aranda company from Montreal. And Aranda had a particular problem in that area. They ended up adopting our invention into the refinery in Montreal. I also worked with a company that was spun off of the Department of Energy in Chicago, a company called I-Chrome Industries. We had the new iron exchange resin that was able to recover iron out of very strong acid solutions. And we used that to purify copper electro-winning solutions which are often contaminated with a little bit of iron. We used the iron exchange process to selectively absorb the iron out of the electrolyte and transfer it out of the impure solution into a waste solution so as to keep the main plant solution clean of iron. And that's been commercialized first in Mexico and then in Australia as well at the same site actually as the autoclave was developed at Mount Gordon way back in the 1990s. You mentioned polymet. And you're also a member of Polymet Safety, Health and Environmental Committee. So I guess kind of slightly following in your father's footsteps in a way. Could you talk a bit about that work? Because that sounds quite interesting. Yeah, so as a board member for Polymet every year when we have our AGM we kind of put our hand up and volunteer for different committees. And one of the ones I've been involved in for a number of years now is the Safety Health and Environment. And of course that relates to making sure that any work done at the site is done safely. And there's all sorts of legislation and regulation in the United States in particular I guess that oversees that. So it's as a board member you're trying to make sure that the people that are running are paying attention to safety aspects and health aspects. And then making sure that all environmental issues are well handled. Now we're actually an interesting site because we've got an older mine which was an iron ore mine upon which we're now going to build our copper, nickel and precious metal mine. So we've got sort of a historical legacy issue. You know what to do with all the historical mining activity at the site. So that's part of what's being managed by the environmental side of the company. And then there's also planning for future operations which have not yet commenced. So looking at the past we're trying to manage whatever releases are coming from the old waste that are present from the iron ore operation that we took over. And then we're trying to plan to make sure that anything that we do in the future is fully within environmental constraints to make sure there's no race of anything nasty to the environment. And that's all part and parcel of the technology development. We're trying you know specifically at PolyNet we try to make sure we remove all sulfides or almost all sulfides from the ore during our flotation process. So we're actually taking the ore, grinding it, taking all the sulfur minerals into one stream and all the non-sulfide minerals go out to a waste impoundment. It's very important because sulfide minerals in nature can of course release acid or sulfates into the environment so we want to absolutely make sure that's not an issue at the site. And then our process that treats the sulfide concentrates basically extracts all the metals and then stabilizes all the other stuff that comes from those minerals into a form that's stable for the environment. So we're planning to take care of the past and plan for the future in terms of what we're doing at the site. A different type of I guess history managing history but very interesting. Now back to a very large part of your career which is the teaching aspect being a professor at UBC could you talk a bit about the classes you teach maybe? Yeah, so I taught a couple of different classes, well quite a few different classes I think starting when I first became a professor I got a first year chemistry class which was absolutely terrifying because you'd get thrown into classes with 300 students about two thirds of which were going into engineering disciplines that didn't like chemistry so they didn't really want to be there and then you had to maintain their interest over the period there'd be two a day for about six weeks during the term. I didn't teach the whole course I taught part of the course but that was quite an experience not necessarily to be repeated I don't think I took that class here but I took that class. Every first year I took that class and then the other class I taught are things like the specialist classes in hydro metallurgy so those are just dealing with the chemical processing of minerals once again so I've taught that at the third year level the fourth year level and the graduate student level and then the other one that's really quite interesting was a course on metallurgical economics which I'm still teaching to this day and when I first joined UBC and was working with Professor Peters it was a class he taught for many years and he said Dave if you want to make sure that your tenure and never get fired teach this class because nobody else wants to teach it so if you start to teach it nobody will want to replace you because you'll have a job for life if you're willing to keep that class and of course that was a joke at the time but it's become an invaluable class because it teaches you all about the economic aspects of what you're doing in mineral treatment which is extremely important so we spent a lot of time actually talking about real life we talk about all sorts of things related to use of money in real life mortgages and pension plans and annuities and all that sort of thing but then we apply that to the mineral side as well and make sure that those personal finance issues are transferred into what it means to run a company and how you make money as a company and all that sort of thing so extremely valuable and why was it so unpopular for the profs? I think because everybody likes to teach in their technical specialty they prefer to do something like that or generic like that and I don't think a lot of the other profs understand it as well as Ernie did and Ernie transferred that knowledge to myself and I thrive with it and I've loved that course ever since it started to teach it Were there any parts of your job whether prof or with companies that you remember and consider being quite dysfunctional whether it's a job or a project I saw that question on your list and I couldn't really think of one offhand I mean in every human organization you've got different levels of dysfunction but there was nothing that ever stood out as being a disaster and maybe I've just tried to avoid anything that looked like that going in and so I haven't sort of been victim to that sort of a situation before the university itself I think is generally well run it's a collegial atmosphere you have a department ed that can influence you but not order you around to tell you what to do exactly so you really master your own destiny at the university which is just fantastic if you have an interest you can pursue it if you want to do a certain research project you can do it as long as you can develop the resources to mount it and then working with companies I tend to find companies that I have an affinity for in terms of their technical challenge and what I can bring to the party and in almost every case that's been a very enjoyable experience so I can't really claim any large episodes of dysfunctionality in my past that way I guess that's good did you throughout your career have you joined any professional organizations or? I've always been a member of CIM going back to my student days I've also been a member of TMS the Mentals, Metals and Materials Society in the United States I was a member of the SME in the United States for some time as well but it was kind of duplicative with the TMS so I didn't continue and I've been a member of the Association of Professional Engineers since 1987 so I have a PIM designation as well and then I guess the other thing I've got is a fellowship of the Canadian Academy of Engineers so that goes back a number of years now as well so that would be an organization that I'm a member of as well have you ever played roles in them? with the CIM I certainly have so I've led the Hydro-Metallurgical Section which is one of the more active sections within the Metallurgical Society so for a number of years I was the chair of that committee very involved in organizing conferences over the years so when we back to 1992 when my professor Ernie Peters was retiring I mounted the Peters Symposium in Vancouver as kind of a not a memorial but a celebration of his career and so we had about 200 and some people come and spend a number of days in Vancouver during that time had a very successful conference and been involved in one in Winnipeg a number of years later been involved in the Copper Series of Conferences very prominent within the Metallurgical Society and then in 2014 we hosted Hydro-Metallurgy 2014 in Victoria so myself and a couple of colleagues from UBC were instrumental in organizing that and so I've been very much involved in that regard did you go this year to MetSoc in Toronto? yes I did I was there as well interviewing quite a few people that would have been another chance to have met yeah so maybe we'll switch a little bit the theme to a few more social questions if we talk about women I always find it quite interesting because it is a in general a world where there aren't or weren't a lot of a lot of women present so throughout your career years it was more academic so it might be different but throughout your career how present were women and how has that changed or not? yeah I think there's been quite an evolution in our industry when I was a high school student I started working I think one year in the underground mine Franco one year at the smelter Franco I don't remember any significant number of women working in either of those sites when I was working at that time I worked at the Coffery, Fineery in Montreal for after my second year any large number of women working at that site and then again working at INCO their J. Roy Gordon research labs back in 80 and 81 there were a few women in research but not a large number and certainly all the senior leadership positions were for men but I think over the years that's changed quite a bit there's more and more women entering the field a lot of chemical engineers have been migrating I think into the field of metallurgy schools have diminished in Canada there's kind of an increase in supply of people from that other discipline into our field and chemical engineering is a field that tends to attract women more readily I think than traditional metallurgy and so there's been more and more women entering the field from that direction one of my daughters I've actually got a son and a daughter who are both chemical engineers my son works up at Goldcorp currently at the Musselwhite mine my daughter is in second year chemical engineering so she's doing a co-op placement in Vancouver and doing pressure leaching and solvent extraction and all the things that I love to do so we can finally have an extended discussion over dinner about our respective activities get everybody else lost in the conversation and it's interesting because in her employment as a young chemical engineer she's finding an awful lot of young women role models so some of the senior managers that she's working with are women and she's very happy to work with them so I think that things are changing quite dramatically we just hired two new professors in extractive metallurgy in our department at UBC one in hydrometallurgy one in pyrometallurgy and both are women so we're seeing more and more women coming and want to of course encourage that it's a lot bigger too in the chemical engineering but also environmental sciences yes environmental science often is a quite a draw for young women that tends to be the case and through all my interviews a lot of the women I've seen or heard of have also been in sustainable development that's another big aspect in the mining and metallurgy world now another question regarding society I guess would be do you think there is a disconnect between the mining and metallurgy world and its industries and the general public and if so why if not why yeah I think the industry is sometimes or in some port is viewed as kind of an older sunset industry or an industry from the last centuries but of course since the dawn of time we've needed materials and into the future no matter what sort of high tech applications we can envisage we need materials so the extraction of materials from the earth is always going to be part of our our society until we get to the point where we can just recycle everything 100% and then don't have to ever touch the earth again but for the foreseeable future we're going to be extracting things from the earth I think that a lot of perceptions of our industry are from the past so I grew up in Sudbury, Ontario I remember as a young child that the NASA astronauts before they came to went to the moon they actually came to Sudbury to drive their lunar lander around the landscape because our landscape looks so much like the moon and of course that was a legacy from when they first started Smelting Nicolour they used to roast at ground level cut down all the trees to make a fire burn the rock at at ground level and any sulfur dioxide gas that released basically rolled across the landscape and whatever trees they hadn't cut down were then killed by the sulfur dioxide so you can imagine what that did to the landscape I'm pleased to say a lot of that's recovered in the time between the 70's and now but in the 1970's it was quite a nasty looking landscape growing up so I think a lot of our perceptions of the industry relate to things that happened 40, 50, 100 years ago and are not currently proper perceptions of what's taking place and the industry is made up of people from the general population none of us want to do any damage to the environment none of us want to leave any bad legacy for the future generations we want to do things properly and responsibly and make sure that we don't leave a footprint that is going to be damaging to future generations Thank you There's a next question to be a tougher I guess loaded question but it is an important question and that's in your opinion are there any people, inventions contributions, disasters anything really that you deem must be mentioned when talking about the natural resource world in Canada Any people's events, disasters whether it be people who've played who you deem have played a significant role nationally or maybe it's a specific event or disaster that has changed Canada in that regard it could be a specific invention anything really anything that comes out sticks out to you when discussing the natural resources in Canada I think in terms of people more than events or disasters and things like that I think I mentioned my mentor Professor Peters many times I think in my experience he was one of the ones that had the biggest influence on me in terms of my development I can remember when I first came to UBC he asked me for a copy of my PhD thesis and he said he wanted to read it I'd come from Queens to UBC to work he wanted to read it so you can understand what I knew and then make sure that while I was working with as a postdoc he could teach me what I didn't know and so I can remember about two weeks after he got a copy of my thesis he invited me to his office for a discussion and when you do a PhD you're very narrowly focused in a certain area and you don't really think about what happens before the area that you're studying or what happens after what happens all around you're just narrowly focused and so he started asking me questions about what comes before what comes after and I had very few good answers for him and I can always remember him looking at me and saying you don't really know much about metallurgy do you? and then I remember having a choice I could either try to bluff my way through you know protest that I knew more than he thought I knew or I could say please teach me and I chose the second path and he spent the next three or four ten years because he worked probably until about 1994 or so at the university but he and I would have coffee together we'd spent a lot of time in his office together just chatting about all the things he knew about metallurgy and all the lessons he wanted to pass on so I kind of got an oral history if you will of metallurgy from Ernie Peters you know his experience dated back to the 1950s he'd been there through the Sherritt Development or shortly after the Sherritt Development he was very much involved with the Kaminko Company on a process called the Zinc Pressure Leach technology developed by Sherritt Gordon and applied first at Kaminko up at Trail so they were kind of these milestone technologies that were explained and understood over the years through this personal relationship that Ernie Peters and I had over those years so I think you know presence of a strong mentor somebody that kind of puts context of the whole industry and all the significant events of the industry was one of my most memorable experiences there thank you also could be considered a tough question but what are you proudest of in life and we can divide it into we could say what are you proudest of in life and also what are you proudest of professionally for wonderful children so full stop I'm proudest of them in life on the metallurgy side I think I'm generally proud of the ability to work closely with industry to solve problems and develop creative solutions that actually address the real problems that they're facing and metal extraction this PolyMap project that I spoke about earlier the way that development came about was that Terry O'Kane and I who were working on a project in Mexico called the Baleo project at the time were spending time at SGS Minerals on the Baleo project and the SGS Minerals people kept talking about this project that came back every couple of years with a new owner where they tried yet again to solve this metallurgical problem in Minnesota this PolyMap project and they try some new flotation process or some new mineral separation process but could never actually solve it and during that period of time there were a lot of developments in hydro metallurgy and we suggested to the owners of the company said why don't we start looking at some creative hydro metallurgy solutions rather than always going back and trying to do some flotation process which was the kind of the tried and true technology of the past and so that spawned the looking at the development that led to the Platsoil process we tried biological leaching, we tried atmospheric leaching, we tried pressure synodation, we tried all these different technologies and then settle on high temperature oxidation in an autoclave with a bit of salt so it was a salt assisted leach and that was able to actually extract all the metals into solution in one step and very much simplify the recovery metals from that deposit and I think that collaboration and it really was a collaboration Chris Fleming was the senior inventor on that technology, Terry and I worked with him on that technology but that was probably one of my proudest moments to actually create a solution for that deposit which was discovered in 1969 still not developed in 2015 but getting closer by the day as we approach our permitting Crazy when you think about it And that's not all that unusual in the mineral field where there's a discovery sitting on the shelf for a long period of time until some kind of technology or economic event comes along where suddenly it becomes valuable and can be put into production I don't know if this is possible to answer but would you say there's a large percentage of mineral deposits in the world that are still not impossible to extract but so difficult to extract still today that they aren't Well there's a huge range of discoveries of different deposits and of course if they're not developed it's because there's not a market for the product or they're not economic or there's some environmental consequence that can't be maintained so I think there's a huge inventory of those projects out there and there's new ones being discovered every day we have the saying all the easy ones are gone and so the hard ones are left which means that the future for my field is quite bright because we're in the business of hopefully adding value to those hard ones in the future Now if you were to talk to someone much younger like a student for example my daughter or your daughter what's the most important life lesson or piece of advice you would give them when looking at their future career or I think the most important thing probably is to work hard and just respond to opportunity when it knocks so that you can only react to opportunity when it presents itself sometimes but you've got to be prepared when it comes and be willing to do kind of outside your comfort zone I can remember one of my early experiences at UBC was a fellow that was an alumnus of UBC was developing a copper mine in Chile and he was using bacteria to leach copper and he was having trouble developing the right bacterial strains and the right process conditions and everything else to leach copper and chili partly because there was lots of chloride or salt in the water that was affecting the bacteria health and so he came and we convened a meeting of the geologists the chemical engineers the microbiologists the mining engineers and the metallurgists and he kind of presented this problem and asked the question you know can you help and I was the first one to put up my hand and I said well we'll try and we've never done anything in biological leaching before but we thought why not give it a try and so we actually worked with one of our former graduates who had gone into the biological field started to develop a program to do work on that project in Chile it was a tremendous example of being willing to learn something new take on a new challenge and be willing to learn and to help and I think that's probably one of the best life lessons for young people don't be so wedded to one thing that you want to do but be prepared for opportunity and be prepared to step in boldly and give it a try say yes that's right Jim Carrey film was one of my favorites there you go got him into trouble a few times but generally was a good attitude for him so is there anything else you'd like to share with me or add I think the mining industry is a tremendous industry for Canada I view it as one of the backbone parts of our economy and backbones of our national psyche if you will we are people that know how to discover minerals we do it in Canada all over the world we try to do it very largely environmentally responsibly economically efficiently and our leaders in the field and that hopefully will continue far into the future well thank you okay thank you very much I just appreciate it