Fundamental Directions
It is important, and difficult, for a small Department to decide which directions to follow in order to become outstanding in at least something. Mount Allison, for example, had the leadership of Eugene Bigelow for many years and then, after a gap of several years, has had the leadership of Ross Barclay. I don’t think that either was an autocrat, but rather independently excellent. At the same time, Mount Allison has maintained a good program in general chemistry. However, in each case, there was only one star albeit in a fundamentally good Department.
Similarly, H.G.Thode led McMaster to become a leading University, first in Chemistry and then in everything else. Thode’s initial work was important to the secret studies of nuclear fission, but he went on to become a world leader in isotope chemistry.
Carleton, at the beginning followed the lead of Jim Holmes and wanted to cover all topics. Jim was a leader in surface area determination (by the BET method). This was not a large or an active field, although he had colleagues in other Universities, including one group in Russia. Paul Laughton worked with Ross Robertson at NRC, and apparently helped with the theory of transition state thermodynamics. Again, it is not a large or an active field, with no colleagues anywhere else that I was aware of.
When I came, I was nearly alone in Canadian Universities in wanting to pursue nuclear chemistry. There was, of course, Chalk River, doing their things; there was Bob Jervis at Toronto, pursuing activation analysis with their new SLOWPOKE reactor on campus. Leo Yaffe had his cyclotron at McGill and continued to study fission yields. My interest was in hot atom chemistry again not a large field. I had colleagues in many countries: Romania, India, Italy and others, but most of the chemical world didn’t seem to care. Yes, I had students and I had visitors from many countries, but it didn’t seem to impress the world, and there was no one at NRC or at the University of Ottawa.
When John ApSimon came, he started synthetic work on terpenes. This led him to become a world leader, with a series of major books on the synthesis of terpenoid compounds and natural products. For a number of years John attracted students, Post-Docs and others from all over. There was no one else in the Department who collaborated with John, so when he went into Administration the work stopped, although the excellence continued for several years in the hands of Ted Edwards.
Cooper Langford could have been a major drawing card for the Department. His personal manner did not lead to agreeable collaboration with other members of the Department. Mike Parris, with whom Cooper could have worked well, was too much of a loner, and was seriously put off by Cooper’s manner.
Don Wigfield looked very promising. He became an authority on the Birch Reduction process, to the extent that Herbert C. Brown the acknowledged dean of the field said that “Don and I and perhaps a couple of other know all there is known about hydrogen reductions”. He had several excellent students. Strangely, he stopped abruptly at one point and did no more research.
There has been good news. Gerry Buchanan, whose nmr work has been steady and productive. He has attracted good grants and has maintained fine nmr spectrometers that serve many graduate students in all areas. Stan Tsai has been steady. Chakrabarti has been productive, and has had many good students. Wayne Wang’s work has attracted widespread attention and support, although little of this is within the Department. As far as I know, there has been little research collaboration among members of the Department. Cooper tried this, in forming the ‘Metals Ions Group’, but there was really little coherence, and it collapsed.
Recently, three new members of the Department have been added, all working on various aspects of nanotechnology. I suspect that their interests may be divergent, so there may be little opportunity for direct collaboration. However, since their experimental techniques are likely to overlap, the intention is that a strong group might emerge.
Most recently a stream of Food Chemistry has been added, with two new and enthusiastic members, and a mass spectroscopy laboratory is starting, with interest for Biochemistry.
Important missed opportunities.
A number of important opportunities have been missed. I point out these in the hope that we may not miss so many opportunities inn the future. Lest I be accused of bias, I start with the things I have missed. There are embarrassingly many.
I started as a radiochemist and did things that interested me. The fact that no one else in the world was interested didn’t seem to matter. This was a mistake. I should have been concerned with things that interested other people, particularly the NSERC granting committees. The fact that we were the best in the world in hot atom chemistry of metal-organic compounds was of no great interest to most people. I tried at one stage to think of medically interesting molecules that could be created by hot atom methods, but found none of interest to the medical people.
Then I got interested in alpha particle measurement, at the suggestion of Alan Prince (then Chairman of the Atomic Energy Control Board). We became one of the top labs in North America for such measurements. However, we didn’t pursue this, feeling that there was nothing more to be done. This was correct, but the decision led no where.
We developed what was at the time (and perhaps still) the largest photo-neutron generator in the world. It could have been developed further, especially in nitrogen determination in feed grains. However, because the Antimony-124 cost so much we didn’t continue.
Joe Dlouhy developed, with the assistance of Louis Raffler and the Science Technology Nentre, what was probably the best Mössbauer spectrometer in the world. We used that for one rather abstruse PhD thesis, and then dropped the whole thing. I don’t know where the spectrometer is now – probably it has been junked.
I was very taken with ideas described by Bryan Hollebone. His thought that the way that an electron goes from one state to another can be studied by magnetic circular dichroism seemed to make sense. I urged Bryan to publish his ideas, but no, he wanted to publish the whole thing at once. Apparently there was a major flaw in his physics that should have been identified early but wasn’t. This led to his being forced to abandon the project.
At one time I was given the opportunity to get an x-ray fluorescence device – perhaps the world’s most sensitive. I bought it and gave it to Bryan. He was not interested, and it has gone who knows where.
At one time, Don Wigfield was one of the world authorities on hydrogen reduction inorganic chemistry. At about his peak, he simply stopped, for no apparent reason. This could have been an important step, not only for Don but also for the Department.
There have likely been a number of other such missed opportunities. I list primarily those that were my own doing, with the expectation that others will occasionally feel the regret that plagues me from time to time.
What to do about this? Perhaps more discussion within the Department and among its members would help us to notice opportunities that we should take up on. For example: should the three nano-technlogists collaborate more closely? Should Wayne Wang’s thin film semi-conductors be helped by Sean Barry’s thin film work? Should Sean’s films be studied using Anatoli’s methods? Should Maria’s nano-procedures become more closely tied to Peter Buist’s molecules? Or to Jim Wright’s? Perhaps these are dumb ideas. But I have seen many good opportunities lost because no one asked the dumb question.
Miscellaneous Suggestions:
While it is no longer directly my business, I feel that I can still air some ideas about how the Department should be run. This renewed enthusiasm of mine may result from a recognition that I didn’t put into effect the ideas I now suggest, although one of them did work well for a while.
Mentoring of Teaching staff: I think that, while every young Assistant Professor should be able to teach a Fourth year course, and after some experience teach a Third year course, the Second and particularly First year courses should only be taught after one has gained a lot of teaching experience, and then only by good teachers. Some can never achieve this level of teaching. It seems possibly useful to take each new Assistant Professor and Lecturer (and especially external Adjunct Professors) under the wing of a seasoned teacher, to learn: how to design a course, how to plan a lecture, how to create an examination and a few other such problems that are taken to be obvious but are often not at all clearly understood. By the later years, students can more or less fend for themselves, but in Second and particularly First year, they must be managed properly or we will lose them. Too often, at that level, we try to teach the Subject, while we should be teaching the Students.
Perhaps a similar approach taken for the laboratory demonstrators should pay off when the students no longer have anything to complain about in their labs.
Similar mentoring would likely be useful in planning a research career: How to focus on one or two objectives, how to write a research proposal, how to manage a graduate student, how to manage a Post Doc. I failed in several of these respects and therefore failed to achieve what could have been a much more productive research career.
In the teaching of Chemistry: I think that it is important to show the students how the chemical elements behave. Too often the lectures describe the theories of reactions that the Professors themselves have not seen, or have forgotten. I suspect that this might be best done through Qualitative Inorganic Analysis – a subject no longer taught in Universities, because it isn’t done in industry. However, this is one of the better ways for a beginning student to get a feel for how things behave. (This is perhaps a lost cause.)
Chemistry has changed during the time this department has grown. We like to think that the Department has grown in tune with the changes of the Science. I think it has. If you look at the present composition of the Department, you see expertise that was not imagined fifty years ago. Nanotechnology, Biochemistry, Laser spectroscopy, GCMS. Even NMR didn’t exist when I started here in fact the first book written on nmr was by a friend of Jim Holmes’ Bill Schneider, who was at NRC. (Schneider, Pople and Bernstein)
Radiochemistry, which is why I was hired, has largely disappeared (although there is now a move to bring it back in under the guise of radioecology). Why did it disappear? Largely because, through wartime studies leading to the development of bombs, most everything was learned. The only things that were left were the technical applications to other fields. These are still going on, and in some places are thriving. Our alumnus, Lee Collier, is one of the best in making radioactive pharmaceuticals with short-lived radionuclides. What is left in Radiochemistry? Perhaps hot atom chemistry, although that is probably too complex; Applications to adsorption, separation, analysis, reaction kinetics and other fields which have their own cultures, so that radiochemistry is merely another technique.
What has been dropped that should have been kept? At the risk of being thought an old fogey, I will say that I regret the loss of qualitative analysis from the First year labs. This was dropped in the 1960s, because “no one does that in industry any more”. I disagree with this as a reason. I think that, especially in first year, the students will be turned on best by reactions that happen visibly before their eyes. The precipitates, the dissolution, the colour changes, the evolution of gases, yes, even the development of smells all these are attractive to students wondering what field to go into. More than that, qualitative analysis gives an excellent introduction to chemical equilibrium and its manipulation.
I am also very concerned about the behaviour of the TA’s in the First Year Labs. Many of then seem not to take their jobs seriously, and show very poor examples to their students. I hope that the TA’s Prize recently established will help this problem, but it will not be enough unless it is greatly increased and more widely advertised. All too often one observes the lab demonstrators standing in a corner talking with each other or, worse, sitting on the lab benches. There must be developed some means of inspiring these important instructors to pass on their enthusiasm to the beginning students. We perhaps need a more senior person in the labs, as we had many years ago. At one time, Allison Flood, a Senior Scientist at NRC came to be an instructor in the Physical Chemistry lab. He was very enthusiastic, and his excitement rubbed off on the students. In earlier days, a series of women ran the First Year labs: Virginia Prince, Mary Wilkinson and several others. They too were very good and were committed to the students’ excellence.
O Tempore, O Mores!