 Well, sometimes in life you luck out and I lucked out with my mom and dad My dad is a very smart man. He's an engineer and my mom is a very smart lady But she didn't work. She was a ballet dancer and then got married and had children and We grew up in a small holding in South Africa, but every day we were just encouraged to find something that was interesting and And it's it's a lesson I've taken through life, you know whenever I have to do something I don't want to do I just say to myself well just find one little bit about this that's interesting and then something becomes almost worthwhile I was raised with a father who didn't believe in keeping animals in cages thank goodness And I certainly don't but we always had animals around the traps So my dad for example had a pet leopard whose mom had been shot by a poachy We weren't that exotic on our little property, but we did grow up with me cats and you know different animals and we spent a lot of time in the bush and with that came this Encouragement to look see think Most of us walk around the life just looking but we don't actually see when it was time for me to go to university my parents didn't tell me what to study and It was back in the 70s and in the 70s. We didn't have named degrees like we have today and my the advice my father gave me was just go study what you like and It's such good advice because you know you're going to end up doing this job for a very long time And you've got a look at you've really got to like what you do so I went to university I did my undergraduate thesis on acid rain. I had my friends with little funnels in the brain catching rain water It was very fun. It was so much fun and to me It's you just make everything fun because life's too short not to have fun So when it was time to get a job, I ended up working for a power utility setting up their acid rain program And again just very lucky because it was very new in South Africa Power the power company wanted to control the way that the laws were being written Of course, I never knew that at the time and so they wanted to drive the research So it was a very clever plurine airport. But from my perspective as a scientist It was a triple-a project. It had almost an unbudgeted an unlimited budget We developed some really nice instrumentation. We did some really interesting work and I ended up getting my master's degree on it Put a lot of hours in a helicopter and in planes flying in plumes And it was a really interesting period learned a lot about working with industry I think for a person who's naturally an environmentalist and and trying to leave a smaller footprint as possible Even though it wasn't planned this way. This was purely coincidental. It just happened Those through four years that I worked with the power industry were probably very very important because they gave me a unique perspective on Why industry does things the way it doesn't and that perspective then provided me with good negotiating Skills later in in my jobs as I grew older and wiser. I Was lucky enough when I was working at the power industry to liaise on with the nuclear physics department at The University of the Vitvatis Ront vits, which was a very good university at the time With a check by the name of Harold Anagon who I hope if he's still alive We'll see this video because he played such a big role in mentoring me and Harold was very interested in the incidences of lung cancer among the indigenous peoples of South Africa who were crammed into townships with very few services and so these people were burning coal and low-grade coal and wood and whatever they could lay their hands on in their little huts in An urban environment with no flu and anything like that and they had very high lung cancer rates And so this photograph shows me when I was about 20 years old doing a study with Harold on the chemical composition of the different sizes of the particles because we were interested in the very very small particles that could get all the way into the lungs and Were carcinogenic and his work with my wee little bit of contribution ended up in the electrification of the township Alexandria, which is where this photograph was taken and a lot of people live in Alexandria And it's really nice to see science Make such a big improvement in the quality of life for people who just simply didn't have a voice So that was pretty cool