 Okay, so let's begin our interview. So first of all, could you please state your full name? Louis Jean Cabri. And what is your age? I'm 82. And where were you born? I was born in Cairo, Egypt. Okay. So as a child, what did your parents do? My father was an entrepreneur and businessman. My wife just, my mother rather, just a housewife, yeah. Okay. And as a child, what were your interests or your pastimes? Well, it was, what I remember mostly is because it was during the war. And I went to a British school, a British preparatory school called Gazira Prep, outside Cairo in the suburb called Zamalek. And there it goes to the British school, sports was very important. And as far as what I did, well, we had limited things. You couldn't buy, for example, I love toy soldiers, but you couldn't buy them because it was a war. So I did other things. We went to a botanical garden nearby and we befriended Commonwealth troops and tried to get badges and things from them. And I used to go out after air raids in the streets and collect shrapnel. I had a big shrapnel collection, things like that, you know, that you make up to make do in the circumstances. Did you ever feel the direct impacts of the war? Well, I have strong memories, strong memories of the air raids and going down to the shelter, the troops. I can even remember it's amazing, but it stays with me during the time of the Battle of El Alamein. It was about 70 miles away and we could hear the guns. And we saw the troops marching to the front. And I'm not sure because we were staying in an apartment, living in an apartment on the main street. And the troops would be walking columns and columns of them, eight or twelve abreast, I can't remember. And we sort of all went on the sidewalk, cheering them on and things like that. And we had many friends among the officers, all Commonwealth troops except Canadians because I don't think there were any Canadians actually in that front, in the Middle East front. So we had officers that used to come for dinner from New Zealand, Australia, South Africa, Brits of course, and so on. Now, in terms of your education at school, what were your strengths? Well, at the preparatory school it was British education with accent on the classics and Latin and so on and so forth. And I left there in 1946 and soon after the war because my father didn't see the future of staying on in Egypt as a businessman. So we emigrated to the United States and I went to high school actually in Skarsdale, New York. So after a half a year of the before high school, I went to Skarsdale High School in New York and after three years there, my father decided to move again and this time we moved to South Africa where I just had the one year of my trick and so I finished school there and went to university. My first university was in South Africa, in Johannesburg. And throughout your schooling, even though you moved a lot, was there a specific interest or strength that kept you throughout? Well, you know what? My hardest, the most difficult subject, the most untransportable subject, arithmetic and stuff like that was easy. The most difficult one was history and that should be of interest to you and that was because I had history with a cultural background in British in Cairo. Then in the US I talked about the explorers and whatnot which I'd never heard of and then one final year of history in South Africa where they talked about the Caffer Wars which I'd never heard of. So that was my hardest subject. But interesting, but hard. Well now you're well versed. Because with history you need a cultural background. So it's not just one thing or just memorizing dates and events and wars but if you're not living in the country it doesn't mean the same to you. Absolutely, for sure. So what did you decide to go to? In what subject you said to... Well I went to the University of Wartes-Ren in Johannesburg and I was interested in chemistry and I don't remember how into geology so I majored in geology and chemistry and over there the system is you take a bachelor's in three years and then you specialize in an honors year which I took geology because I sort of liked it and after graduating there I worked as a junior field geologist mainly in West Africa I worked in the Gold Coast before it became Ghana and I worked in Sierra Leone and in South Africa and so after four years of working as a junior geologist I realized that I needed some graduate degrees to get on. I didn't want to stay because the situation in South Africa especially was there was these big mining houses they were much bigger than they are now because now other companies got bigger worldwide but they were very big at the time Anglo-American and so on and you worked for them as a junior I didn't see the chances of moving up so I thought I needed some more education and I came to McGill to Montreal and McGill because in what I knew about in South Africa was that that was the place to go to the reason being that in the 30s many McGill graduates went to South Africa and they ended up by being the chief geologist of the big mining houses so since they had succeeded in that way it seemed that's where you go I didn't know much this is a day before the internet before you really knew anything about other places all I knew about Canada was that it was cold and McGill, that's really all we knew so we got married and came as immigrants now the reason why we came as immigrants not just as a student was because I thought well my wife would have to work to support me I would have to work in the summer I didn't know anything about the work situation and I just thought it would be easier having lived in many different countries to live in a country if you're an immigrant rather than a visitor and so when when I finished my studies at McGill we didn't even discuss whether we should stay because it was a no-brainer we liked it so initially the plan was to go there and come back we had no plan you're young, you get married but I just wanted to have the flexibility of working with everything open and really no plan I mean just to get better move up my career so how did you find Canada initially? well it was actually we adapted very easily being fluent in English and French helped because I was Belgian until I became Canadian I was always Belgian even though I was born in Cairo I was Belgian my father so we spoke French at home so it was not difficult at all my wife got a job immediately with rapid grip in Bratton in downtown Montreal as an industrial artist and I had no trouble getting summer jobs it was traditional there in McGill that the companies used to come and interview the students during near the end of the term and then you got summer jobs and I don't remember being asked whether I was an immigrant or not you just got a job and that was easy it made it possible for me to stay for us to stay so what was your first official job in Canada? in Canada the first job was actually what was called then the Quebec Department of Miners we did reconnaissance mapping in the part of Quebec that became a dam eventually I think his name was Solveille was the name of the chief geologist I was the assistant chief and we had a small party so what became it was a masters I did the masters first and in fact my only ambition when we came was to do a masters I hadn't thought further and actually I came to do what was called then the masters in applied which was the two years was in mining subjects mining and engineering subjects and the second half was advanced geological subjects so the idea that you would be more easily adaptable to work in industry that was the whole goal it was the MSC applied and then I got interested in research and stayed on and did a PhD research on my research was on the gold silver tellurium system it was a phase equilibrium study and I worked my professor was Lloyd Clark and he was very young he had just been appointed I think in McGill he was a recent graduate he had done his studies at the Carnegie institution which was very well known research in phase equilibria and that sort of thing and so I actually helped him build his original lab there at McGill and that's what I did my thesis on was phase equilibria in the gold silver tellurium system and tried to relate that to how we find gold silver mineralogy in deposits Canada was a good place for that then so what did you do after your doctorate well I got offers from industry but I'd been working in the field every summer basically other times it was fly camps every week and all that sort of thing and my family was growing so I was looking for something that was more in town and got an offer from what was then the mines branch and the attraction was they had started a research program there called the sulphide research program and the leading light there was Ernie Nicholl the late Ernie Nicholl who unfortunately left Canada and went to Australia in the early 70s but that's another story but yes so that was the attraction and there was a very strong research environment at the mines branch at that time there was for example there was people like the late John Keyes who was a physicist there was Archie Gillison who was actually building an electron micro probe which was a new instrument at the time that you couldn't even buy commercially he was building one for CANMET there were really top scientists our division chief was Dr. Alan Prince who eventually headed the inland waters branch when it was started when the environment became important we had Dr. Bob Cunningham in physical metallurgy we had other important people in metallurgy for example in extractive metallurgy and they were the ones that during the war and after had developed the Blind River and the El Dorado uranium deposits CANMET itself what was still mines branch then still had a pilot plant and I think was instrumental in many mines being started in Canada because they did the piloting then the old mines and my section head when I came he was Morris Haycock now he was a graduate of Princeton had been many years at mines branch and I didn't have much of an opinion of him when I arrived because he was only a nominal only nickel was really doing everything so he was there and he seemed to spend his time making extraordinary lunches for himself he would use a fume hood and fry up actually potatoes and things with it it was just amazing and you sort of watch us from the side but later on I happened to obtain a sample mineralized sample from a collection from Princeton University that he had worked on and I was amazed at how astute his observations were in the early 30s on that sample and now of course we could do other things with it that he couldn't do then and in fact and this is relevant to CIM Morris Haycock published a paper in 1937 in CIM bulletin that had to do with the grain size of gold in different deposits and how it affects processing minimal processing and he had done a lot of work with so many different ores across Canada that he was able to tabulate and arrive at some kind of logical classification of grain size to when you start to observe the grain and when you can't see it anymore it was then so called invisible gold and his paper of 1937 is still relevant today so my opinion of him changed and in fact I named the mineral after him Haycockite, yeah we can talk about that we can ask you partly why they're called what they're called you have discovered a few minerals so maybe you can describe them tell me what they are quite frankly I can't remember the number I can remember just some I was arrived at Canmet in 64 and as I said there were all kinds of analytical developments that were important to mineralogy and metallurgy at that time one of them is called the electron micro probe or the scanning electron microscope and as I said Archie Gilson was trying to build one but he gave up the geological survey next door they had an early prototype model called an alien micro probe now what a micro probe does is it enables you or the person whatever he is or she to analyze a particle a very tiny particle it could be as small as one tenth of a millimeter okay well that's small that is on a polished surface we call those things polished sections you cut a rock make a slice and polish it and then you can look at it under the microscope in reflected or transmitted light so with this instrument the micro probe you're able to direct a beam of electrons on that tiny particle and then you can get the characteristic x-rays that will determine the chemistry so you have the chemistry of a tiny particle let's say one tenth of a millimeter in diameter and you know exactly what it contains so it's the big jump from what I was brought up with which is you give your sample your freshest sample to the chemist they dissolve it, it's all gone and you get some result in the temperature often so here you get a not only do you get a result chemical result from something that is one phase, one mineral but you know exactly what it is so I was interested in this and I went over to Bob Trail was in charge of that Ilion probe at the time and so I talked him into setting it up I I read a paper about by the Russians about a certain kind of calcopyrite now calcopyrite is a copper iron sulfide it's very common it's the principal mineral from which you get copper, okay calcopyrite now they talked about this strange calcopyrite, it was very badly described and all but it intrigued me and so and remember those were the days of the Cold War and so I just fired off a letter on the letterhead paper and all but not to the author because the way the system worked there you write to the academician that presented the paper that's how their system was at the time so I wrote to him and asked for a sample now it was really people just laughed when I told them well two months later in a brown box I get a sample of ore from the famous Norilsk deposit in Siberia this is I mean nobody else in the west had a piece from Norilsk because Cold War secret copper nickel deposit massive, very rich platinum metals I mean this was top secret stuff you weren't supposed to give it away well I got it and I had a sawn cube about this size about 3, 4 centimeters across and so I sliced it and I took it over to Bob Trail and did a geological survey and I had looked at it microscopically first with the optical microscope and found these very bright white shiny little bits in there about a tenth of a millimeter slightly bigger and so on so asked them to analyze them and yeah so two of them were minerals of palladium now palladium is one of the six platinum group elements and it's very commonly used for example in many many alloys in industry in motor cars and for the exhaust system and so forth you know for pollution control so yeah so I had these two new minerals I knew they were new because I did some research on them and this was what led me into an interest in platinum group elements yeah it was just fortuitous you know sending a request for a sample and came in and so forth yeah so was this lab one of the first in the world to have the electron micro probe? no no no we were the electron micro probe is a French invention the first one was by Raymond Castang it was his PSD ceases in France and many people were trying to copy his design and so forth and the Russians had their own version of that in which they were the first to apply it actually for platinum group minerals and nobody else had but then I got doing it in Canada and so forth and became interested in that so very early for Canada then what happened was now that alien didn't work out Archie had to give up his project there were several companies competing and now there are two left in the world that produce these electron micro commercially and of course with the computers now because before we used to have all kinds of tubes and so forth running them and they would conk out and so forth but what happened though as far as Canada goes is we were among the first probably as a group of applied mineralogists to apply this technology to understanding quantitatively ores so we applied it and we even developed a system which was for many long time probably the fastest to do what is known as image analysis where you do a quantitative analysis of the grain size and the composition and the associations of minerals which is essential information for mineral processing and we had the system that which was really really very good in collaboration with Zeiss but for reasons that I don't know whether it was management at the time or whether it was people involved or what but we didn't commercialize it so we were pipped by CSIRO who are more driven in terms of commercializing things but they have a very good support in that domain and so their system became you know the dominant one until another company also Australian was formed who copied the CANMET system but in a more modern way and long history these two companies competed eventually one went bankrupt and now it's just one company yeah so you became principal scientist so what are there any other whether it's discoveries or projects you worked on that are worth mentioning well as I said the quantitative you know determination of ores and minerals was what we developed at CANMET and applied it to so that you know the ore process and metallurgists we were talking in the same language what they needed we could provide basically yeah there was it was difficult though because I don't remember when this started but initially when I arrived we were very very science driven and that is what attracted me but then we were introduced to the so called cost recovery which quite frankly never really worked well because it is in my opinion not really possible to compete we were not supposed to compete with industry in terms of the cost of things and yet we were supposed to get contracts and on the basis though we were better well that is subjective and so it was a difficult balancing act and then we had other complications because there were some managers that were hired with no experience in the industry at all I remember one of our managers he came from prisons now how could he be expected to make decisions on things that are very technical when you have that kind of background I mean it was really not fair it wasn't right but what could you do you couldn't go against what was done and then am I allowed to mention names sure it is well then we had a tornado arrived by the name of Erwin Itzkiewicz now Erwin came from industry I heard afterwards that he had been fired actually but he came from industry as a golden boy he was going to get us on the right path on cost recovery and so on so what he did was we were sent on many many courses feel good courses all kinds of things to to get to know each other and work together and as if we didn't work before together but the main problem he did was he destroyed our structure he destroyed we had the most marvelous technicians they were highly trained very very reliable they were like part of family and and he destroyed that by by sort of empowering the technicians so that they could create their own projects and so scientists were left without technicians maybe you've heard that from others but that was disastrous so very very few technicians were left to work with and here you were trying to bring in cost recovery do science and so it is a very difficult balancing act yeah now there was a mineral that was named after you yes by the Russians okay so how did that well you see you can't just find a mineral and decide it's new and then give it a name there is an international commission with I don't know how many countries are members but maybe say 20-25 countries have representatives so you submit your data which is the data necessary to prove that that mineral is unique and you know based on chemistry and crystallography basically and other physical properties so you send that to the chairman of the commission and he goes over it it's a very rigorous thing and he often will return it to you with more things, more data needed or whatever and then submits his approved text to the members of the commission and they have six weeks to vote on it and then when the votes come in and they have two votes they have one vote for the mineral the data itself whether the data are scientifically solid and secondly on the name so that's what's involved so in this case the Russians found this mineral and they sent it to the commission and they wanted to name it after me which is very kind of them in recognition of my work in that area because it's a palladium copper tin alloy okay, yeah so and because you were known to work a lot with platinums yeah, yeah my work in platinum actually maybe highlighted by my two books and both of them are CIM books one is CIM volume 23 and the other CIM volume I think 42 or 40 I can't remember sorry anyway they had to do with everything about the mineralogy of platinum and recovery and processing and things like that yeah, yeah the first one was published in 81 and it was reprinted in 89 because it had sold out and it was known as the Bible to people in fact the first time I went to Russia I saw in all their labs they had a Xerox copy of it because they couldn't get the book itself they managed to and they had it bound as a book a course back yeah so for those who don't necessarily know much about geology or mining what why is platinum so important well platinum is you might say an essential element but it's really more than just platinum there's this platinum the main ones are platinum palladium and rhodium there are six elements but these are the three principal ones and they're essential to industry I mean you have platinum on spark plugs you have platinum alloy as I said in the exhaust to take care of pollution in cars platinum is a catalyst in many industrial processes cracking of oil you name it there are these alloys are present yeah so the generally they are high melting alloys and very very resistant to corrosion, oxidation and things like that there's an overall very strong resistant element so it was the element that was named after you was called kebricyt the mineral kebriite traditionally you end up with many mineral names with it kebriite and this was did it have to do a little bit with the first relationship you developed with the Russians because by then it was I think 83 or something like that I published quite a lot I mean my book had come out and I've done a lot of work in that area I found several new minerals in Canada for example we found a mineral in Sudbury which we named Sudburyite in the deposits there and that's a palladium antimony mineral and subsequently we found many more now through your career what would you say was the most dysfunctional or even challenging part whether it was a project or a specific position you held well I've alluded to that it was really trying to balance you know being on top at the leading edge of science and trying to do cost recovery in a government environment it is not easy at all it doesn't work well it's got to give somewhere now who would you say would be your greatest mentor Ernie Nicholl he was a great person and a great mineralogist and but he sort of he was looking ahead it was around 69 and already there was hints about changing the policy in terms of science and cost recovery and all that sort of thing and he wanted to continue being able to work as a mineralogist and doing research in mineralogy so he was enticed to go to CSIRO and he left Canada and we lost him for good and in fact he became famous there because he was given free rein like he had in Canada he had his own here and he did the same over there until then eventually at the time of his retirement they were also going on to cost recovery but he was well away and was not affected now a few next few questions are more of social questions but the first I always ask and that's throughout your career how present or absent yeah in my field or at least at Cannes Met at Mainz Brunch Cannes Met we had very few women they were either in procurement secretarial work the only women even then was a few in chemistry they had chemists that was it and that changed of course now for example because I was involved with several universities in terms of being junked and things like that now in geology, mineralogy it seems there are more women than men for example with many of the metallurgists I deal with they are women I deal with people at Extrata and all the people I deal with are women and things like that so it's changed considerably yeah and the next question is do you believe there's a disconnect between the natural resource world and the general public and if so or if not why well I think so I think we don't do enough to explain to the public what we do there's no question to me that the public sees mining as being dirty and contaminating and so forth so I don't think we do a good enough job there but I've never been in a position to really help in that respect because it just hasn't been my role but I think that is a problem and certainly we could do a lot more I mean we could have done a lot more maybe I don't know because I speak of something I don't know much about but for example they had a very big program and probably still continuing called acid mine drainage now this was to mitigate the effects of contamination due to the breakdown of sulphide minerals and acidifying lakes and things like that now they spend a lot of money and I think they must have had a lot of successes but does the public know about that? I don't know and that is the issues because I think that the mining industry really for my views of it is at the forefront of trying to mitigate and improve things but does the public know that? I don't think they do it is true what you most likely hear about if you're outside of the industry is pretty much only the bad things exactly and things for example like you mentioned the word cyanidation and the public just goes flips and things are going to be poisoned and they don't realize for example cyanide oxidizes in the atmosphere it isn't a stable compound and so forth I mean there's little simple things that could be better explained but we just don't do it I think it's also there's disconnect perhaps because the public also doesn't necessarily understand not everybody studies chemistry or geology and so therefore they don't necessarily understand these processes or these minerals question for you why did you get into geology and mineralogy and why do you like it? Well I was interested in chemistry mainly and when I went to the in Johannesburg and I went to the person guiding the guidance counselor there about what courses I should go in because I was interested in science and I was sort of nudged to geology saying it was such a good fit with chemistry and that's how I got into the mining world really and then I was and when I started as I mentioned I was really working as a field exploration geologist and I continued to do so when I came to Canada but then I got into research and one thing led to the other I mean you know I started studying very what is you know a little bit removed phase equilibria though they are very relevant to industrial processes and then just by trying to learn about all this new instrumentation that was coming into being which was so powerful that I stumbled on some new things that got me excited and I maintained my excitement I mean I'm still working as a consulting mineralogist and enjoyed very much I have a lot of clients and but I still do some publishing when I'm allowed to publish and so yes in fact we have a paper in press in the Canadian mineralogist a new mineral that I found in the positive near marathon Ontario and we called it cold wellite after the cold well complex now so this is work I did for a still water mining company they have the property and got permission very kindly because you don't always get that permission to publish information about that new mineral so we were able to characterize it I didn't do all the characterization work because I just did enough because when you work on contracts there's only so much of budget I knew enough about it to know that it was a new mineral unknown to science but we needed to do some much more in depth academic work so I've got some friends in academia that did that and together we're publishing that paper on cold wellite it's a mineral that has palladium and silver and sulfur so you retired but not really well no I mean I'm busy I can tell now the next question there's no wrong answer and it's an opinion question really but it is a near full so I'll read it out in your opinion are there any events people inventions contributions disasters anything really that you believe must be mentioned when talking about the modern history of the natural resources in Canada so it could be someone who you think changed an aspect of mining forever could have been a disaster that changed rules and regulations for the better yeah well I wasn't involved in policy well the rules and regulations when they were changed for the worst as I mentioned cost recovery I mean that did not help that did not help and they couldn't get now maybe there is no answer I don't know okay because I was not in a position I kept away from the politics of it so maybe there is no answer because if you aren't allowed to compete with industry and yet still do work for industry there's something there that didn't somehow meld very well to me that was not helpful at all yeah because let's face it but again the world has changed so maybe I'm what I'm saying is not that relevant because there's no question that so many mines were started in Canada because of the work done at the then mine branch and you can't say that anymore so that speaks for itself and what about if you look outside of the mines branch or can met from you simply following what happens across Canada has happened across Canada for the past 50 years let's say is there something that stands out that impresses you or you believe marks part of the history of the research really think that our group there in mineral sciences were very much instrumental in introducing the concept of quantitative mineralogy which is now taken as just a no brainer is that that is what you do in terms of industry and I think that it was really our group that put all the seeds in place and did enough of the work applied work to push it through and make it recognized because I think we all appreciate that the mining industry really is very conservative and they don't like to get into new things necessarily when once something works they'll just stay with it so I think this was being our biggest contribution the mineral division there mineral sciences was the quantitative aspect of mineralogy so just a few questions to close what are you proudest of in your professional career well I don't know I'm just happy to know that people use for example these CIM volumes on the platinum elements it's a very satisfactory to know that people use them in their labs and that's basically it really it's nice to see your work being used and last question to someone much younger like a student for example and I'll divide this in two parts but first what would you tell them in regards to their future if you were to give them a piece of advice or a life lesson if you're going to go in the mineral industry well I was going to ask in general and then I was going to ask specifically in the mineral well I don't know it's a question of you know being true to the evidence to make sure that whatever you produce is correct and the integrity involved in making sure that it is I think that's very important having been long involved in publication and being currently still a reviewer of many papers I don't see as much of that ethic these days as it used to be and I think it remains to be reminded that people should be reminded that they've got to be highly ethical and to be as correct as they can and also to cite things correctly there's all kinds of games being played now in different publications with different groups you know citing each other ad nauseam and so on so to keep away from that and to just really look at the data and be sure it's correct and why should they get into the mining mineralogy industry because it is very rewarding in the sense that you're always working with the unknown no matter what anybody might say or think there are no two deposits the same no two or exactly the same and I'm still learning new things so if someone at my age can be learning new things there must be some attraction if you like that sort of thing well thank you is there anything else you'd like to add no I hope I haven't said too many wrong things about people but the policy change there was really controversial and I'm convinced it wasn't successful well thanks a lot for your time