l'actualité chimique canadienne ice ice baby · november | december 2015 canadian chemical...

www.cheminst.ca November | December 2015

accnCanadian ChemiCal news l'aCtualité Chimique Canadienne

Ice Ice BaBy

Ice making with the Vancouver Canucks

EASING DRUG TRANSITION FROM LAB TO MARKETPLACE

A NEW PARADIGM FOR NUCLEAR POWER

4 November/December 2015 www.cheminst.ca/magazine

(L-R) Rogers Arena ice crew members Steve Good, Keith Fong and Gavin Hamblin put the finishing touches on the Canuck orca. Painting logos as well as blue and red lines, goalie creases and faceoff circles is one of many stages of ice preparation for the new NHL hockey season.

Feature stories

34CHEMICAL ENGINEERING

The big chill Behind every NHL team is a group of experts who keep the ice battle ready.

By Roberta Staley

24CHEMISTRY

New prescription Montreal’s NEOMED Institute has rewritten the drug development model.

By Tim Lougheed

30BUSINESS

Worth its salt? Terrestrial Energy has created a unique design for inte-grated molten salt reactors.

By Tyler Irving

Cover: Richard Driver is the conversion crew leader at Rogers Arena, home of the Vancouver Canucks. Driver oversees the transformation of the arena from special events, such as a rock concert, to hockey rink. Here he sprays one of 70 layers of water that will make up the three centimetre-thick amorphous solid that the Canucks call home ice. Photo by Jeff Vinnick

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www.cheminst.ca/magazine November/December 2015 5

Table of ContentsNovember | December 2015 Vol.67, No.6

9 FRoM THE EdIToRBy Roberta Staley

10PoLICY PUNdITMoving R&D into the private sector is a smart move for Canada. By Peter Calamai

12 GUEST CoLUMNCo-ops give chemical engineering graduates an edge in the workforce. By Christine Moresoli

13 GUEST CoLUMNSustainability a core value thanks to CIAC’s Responsible Care program.

By Richard Paton

14 ELECTIoN 2015How science will fare in the post-election landscape.By Paul dufour

15 INTELLECTUAL MATTERSPatent laws can lag behind new inventions. By Mike Fenwick

46CHEMFUSIoN Rogue molecules can cause havoc in the human body.By Joe Schwarcz

16 CHEMICAL NEwS• How materials cope inside a nuclear reactor• Tissue engineers follow Velcro’s lead• Beryllium built for space travel

Columns Departments

44 THEN ANd Now M&T Products of Canada provided chemicals to the food sector as well as industry to ensure products would attract the attention of consumers.

40 SoCIETY NEwS• Queen’s University debuts annual poster day• CSChE and CGCEN winners announced• 65th Canadian Chemical Engineering Conference

ThE CIC AND ITS SOCIETIES

WOULD LIKE TO ThANK

ThEIR 2015 NATIONAL

AWARD SPONSORS

AB Sciex Alfred Bader, HFCIC Analytical Chemistry Division Atkins BantrelBeaumier Churcott Fund Boehringer Ingelheim Pharmaceutical Ltd.Canadian Council of University Chemistry Chairs The Canadian Journal of Chemical EngineeringCanadian Journal of ChemistryCanadian Science Publishing (CSP)CIC Chemical Education Fund CIC/SCI Canada CSA GroupDima Technology Inc.E. W. R. Steacie Endowment FundGilead Alberta ULC GreenCentre Canada HatchMaterials Chemistry Division Maxxam Analytics Montreal CIC Local Section NOVA Chemicals Corp. Organic Chemistry Division Physical, Theoretical and Computational Chemistry Division Rio Tinto Alcan Shell Canada Ltd.Strem Chemicals Inc.Suncor Energy FoundationTeva Canada Limited University of Alberta, Dept. of Chemical and Materials EngineeringUniversity of OttawaVertex Pharmaceuticals (Canada) Incorporated

Thank you also to our student award sponsors.

For more details, go to www.cheminst.ca/awards

CONGRATULATIONS2015 AWARD WINNERS

Daniel B. Leznoff, FCIC • Michael Wolf, FCIC • Janet A. W. Elliott, FCIC

Beaumier Award for High School/CÉGEP Chemistry Teachers: Yvonne Clifford • CIC Award for Chemical Education: David Stone • CIC Medal: Axel Becke, FCIC • Environment Division Research and Development Dima Award: Frank Wania • Macromolecular Science and Engineering Award: Julian X. X. Zhu

CIC Fellows

CIC Awards

Alfred Bader Award: Michael A. Kerr • Award for Research Excellence in Materials Chemistry: Dmitrii F. Perepichka • Bernard Belleau Award: Andrei K. Yudin • Boehringer Ingelheim Research Excellence Award: André Beauchemin • Canadian Journal of Chemistry Best Paper Award: Adrian Schwan, FCIC • Clara Benson Award: Laurel Schafer • CCUCC Chemistry Doctoral Award: Mita Dasog • E. W. R. Steacie Award: William Cullen, FCIC • Fred Beamish Award: Janine Mauzeroll • John C. Polanyi Award: Terrance McMahon • Keith Fagnou Award: Derek Pratt • Keith Laidler Award: Gonzalo Cosa • Maxxam Award: David D. Y. Chen • Rio Tinto Alcan Award: Steven Holdcroft, FCIC • R.U. Lemieux Award: Chao-Jun Li, FCIC • Strem Chemicals Award: Muralee Murugesu • Teva Canada Limited Biological and Medicinal Chemistry Lectureship Award: David M. Perrin • W. A. E. McBryde Medal: Hua-Zhong (Hogan) Yu

CSC Awards

Award for Best Graduate Student Paper Published in The Canadian Journal of Chemical Engineering: Ali Sarvi • Bantrel Award in Design and Industrial Practice : Biao Huang, FCIC • D. G. Fisher Award: Peter L. Douglas • Hatch Innovation Award: Milica Radisic • Process Safety Management Award: David Guss • R.S. Jane Award: James M. Piret, FCIC

CSChE Awards

Canada Medal: Kim Sturgess • International Award: Dave Emerson • Kalev Pugi Award: Esteban Chornet • LeSueur Memorial Award: Alan Fair • Purvis Memorial Award: Duke du Plessis

SCI Canada Awards

CGCEN Award for Individual: Andrew Dicks

CGCEN Awards

From the Editor

executiVe DirectorRoland Andersson, Mcic

eDitor Roberta Staley

news eDitorTim Lougheed

art Direction & Graphic DesiGnKrista Leroux

contributinG eDitorsPeter CalamaiTyler HamiltonTyler Irving

coluMnistsPeter Calamai Mike FenwickJoe Schwarcz, Mcic

society newsLyndsay BurmanAmy Reckling Gale Thirlwall

Director, coMMunications anD MarketinGBernadette Dacey, Mcic

circulation Michelle Moulton

Director, finance anD aDMinistrationJoan Kingston

inDustrial DeVelopMent leaDer Jeffery Butson, Mcic

eDitorial boarDEmily Cranston, McicJoe Schwarcz, Mcic, chairMilena Sejnoha, McicBernard West, Mcic

eDitorial office222 Queen street, suite 400ottawa, on k1p 5V9t. 613-232-6252 | f. [email protected] | www.cheminst.ca/magazine

[email protected] • 613-232-6252

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ACCN (Canadian Chemical News / L’Actualité chimique canadienne) is published six times a year by the chemical institute of canada, www.cheminst.ca.

recommended by the chemical institute of canada (cic), the canadian society for chemistry (csc), the canadian society for chemical engineering (csche) and the canadian society for chemical technology (csct). Views expressed do not necessarily represent the official position of the institute or of the societies that recommend the magazine.

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for some of you who, for whatever reason, missed out on the early 1990s hip-hop

scene, an explanation of this issue’s cover appeal might be in order. Vanilla Ice's hit, “Ice Ice Baby,” was the first hip-hop single to top the Billboard charts. It also nicely sums up this issue’s chemical engineering story, which details how flaw-less hockey ice is created at NHL rinks. In our minds, it’s not just the players who deserve the glory but the crew that keeps the ice temperature stable, maintains the brine that circulates under the arena floor and monitors the anhydrous ammonia refrigeration system that keeps the brine chilled. Management at Rogers Arena, home of the Vancouver Canucks, kindly took ACCN behind the scenes to show how it’s done.

There’s more than just hockey on our minds this issue. In “Worth its Salt?” Tyler Irving looks at the world of nuclear fission and discovers the seeds of a renaissance. With the repercussions of climate change becoming ever more severe, the world is seeking alternatives to petroleum energy. A new variety of small-scale nuclear reactors could offer advantages that renewables likes solar so far seem to lack.

If you have a headache from watching your favourite hockey team lose yet again (a problem for us Canucks fans in past seasons), then you’ll be glad to know that Canada’s embattled pharmaceutical industry has taken a turn for the better. Specifically, this is the creation of NEOMED Institute, a not-for-profit group that was started when pharmaceutical multinational AstraZeneca abandoned its spacious Montreal digs in 2012. As Tim Lougheed writes, NEOMED is taking on the challenge of finding new ways to turn pharmaceutical prospects into marketable products.

Our Chemistry News section presents a host of interesting stories, including new ways of testing materials destined to be used in a nuclear reactor, the creation of a new portal offering information on the most useful chemical probes for biological testing and the creation of unique materials that might some day mend broken hearts.

By the time you flip through ACCN, the results of Canada’s hard-fought national election will be tallied. This issue includes a column by Paul Dufour, principal of PaulicyWorks and a University of Ottawa adjunct professor, analyzing what the elec-tion results mean for the nation’s disgruntled science community.

With the holiday season just around the corner, we wish you and your family all the best. And, of course, Go Canucks!

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accn welcomes letters to the editor at [email protected]. Letters should be sent with the writer’s name and daytime phone number.

All letters will be edited for clarity and length.


Policy Pundit

David Strangway has been a prominent and influential voice in science policy Canada for more than four decades. A former president of three universities: Toronto, UBC and Quest in Squamish, BC, 81-year-old Strangway was also founding pres-

ident of the Canada Foundation for Innovation (CFI) and played a major role in designing the Canada Research Chairs program.

Strangway’s beginnings have a touch of the exotic. Born in Canada, he grew up in the then Portuguese colony of Angola where his parents ran a mission hospital and attended high school in Bulawayo in Southern Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe. He still consults on science matters with the Angolan government.

After being awarded a PhD in physics in 1960 from the University of Toronto, Strangway taught at two universities in the United States before joining the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) in 1970 where he was responsible for the geophysics aspects of the Apollo missions. Next came the U of T from 1973 to 1985, the last two years as president, followed by president of UBC from 1985 to 1997.

Then, at the age of 64, he took on the demanding role of CEO and president of CFI, operating with considerable policy finesse and irrepress-ible humour. Strangway left CFI in 2004 for the challenge of founding Quest, Canada’s first independent, secular, not-for-profit university. An officer of the Order of Canada, he is Quest’s chancellor emeritus.

By Peter Calamai

Cuts to government ministries have negatively affected research and development in Canada. Nonetheless, moving R&D into the private sector will create capacity, or what science policy expert David Strangway calls “smart procurement.”

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Get Smart


Policy Pundit

Q How do you see the state of scien-tific research in Canada today?

A There is no doubt that there is a tough squeeze going on particularly with respect to science being done within government. As I look at Fisheries and Oceans Canada, as I look at Natural Resources Canada, as I look at all these activities, there are really severe cuts taking place. However, it seems to me there is some attempt to try to reinforce the capacity of research and development in the country but that takes place outside of government, within universities and the private sector.

Q Many reports have said that R&D in the private sector in Canada lags far behind private-sector R&D in other comparable countries. Do you see that as an issue?

A Certainly, but I see that as an issue that is much more attributable to government than people would generally realize. Moving research outside of government — not just to universities — but moving it into the private sector has been a really important aspect of building US capacity in the private sector. It’s what I call smart procurement.

Q Much of the private sector emphasis in Canada is not on manufacturing but on exploitation of natural resources. Will smart procurement address that issue?

A That’s the attempt. And it’s not just my thinking. There are explicit obser-vations in the 2011 Jenkins report (Innovation Canada: A Call to Action) that the opportunity to do smart procure-ment will be very high in the forthcoming massive expenditures on Canada’s mili-tary. So building ships, or building airplanes or building parts for airplanes or whatever it is we finally end up doing,

there are going to be billions and billions of dollars expended in Canada’s private sector. And the question in my mind is, how are they going to make sure that a portion of that is being set aside so that the research for the next generation [of equipment] is done.

Q Do you see any evidence that we’re back to a “brain drain” in the sense that promising young researchers look at the situation in Canada and say, “I don’t think there’s a future here for me.”

A The “brain drain” conversation stopped once the CFI and the Canada Research Chairs got going. I haven’t heard that we’re into a brain drain problem of any major proportions yet. Yes, we’re losing some good people I’m sure but I think we’re still attracting and keeping some of the best. The Canada Research Chairs had an enor-mous impact on the universities. What most people haven’t talked about is that those Chairs were allocated to the universities in proportion to the research grants received from the granting councils. So they were reinforcements of excellence. The whole intention was to give a tool to the univer-sities in order to build upon the excellence that was already there.

Q That raises the question of whether we already have two classes of univer-sities that are treated differently by governments — the research-intensive U15 Group of Canadian Research Universities and then all the rest. Is that healthy?

A The beauty of what we’ve got is that it isn’t making any definition [of elite] but it is allowing the strong to become stronger and allowing the weaker to become a little stronger than they were before. So everyone is moving up — a rising tide.

Canada has an opportunity to raise the tide even further and if we could do that maybe we could get some universities into the top ranking globally. We don’t have any universities in the top 20 in the Shanghai Academic Ranking of World Universities and we have only four in the top 100. As good as we think we are, that’s pretty sad.

Q Why would someone with all your background in research want to found a liberal arts undergraduate college like Quest that doesn’t have a research component of any particular size?

A When you look at the interesting issues of the day they don’t have much rela-tionship to the departmental structures in universities. In the world we’re living in today, you cannot be a fully educated person unless you’ve had a good exposure to science, humanities and social sciences. We wanted to get faculty members and students crossing every conceivable boundary. In the first two years students take 16 courses, half of which are science and math focused and the other half are social sciences and humanities focused. And they all take all of those courses. So they graduate with a bach-elor of arts and science.

Q Are there any other aspects of the research environment in Canada on which you’d like to comment?

A I would love the government to say that every major procurement goes through a filter that looks at what it is doing to help build Canada’s R&D and S&T capacity. Whether it’s Arctic activities or offshore activities, there is so much we can do if we can decide, as government, that we wanted to move in these kinds of directions. It doesn’t take a lot of new money; it takes a rethink of how you spend the money that you’re spending.

This interview has been condensed and edited.


Guest Column

When chemical engineering students graduate, they face a career dilemma other recent grads would kill

for. Should they go into oil refining or biotechnology? Pharmaceuticals, nuclear energy or the food industry? Process development or project management? Whether they’re investigating toxins in our oceans or researching polymers in space, for new chemical engineers looking for employment the sky is liter-ally the limit.

Alex Upenieks, a third-year student in the chemical engineering program at the University of Waterloo, has already made up his mind about how his future will unfold.

“I have a very specific plan,” Upenieks says. “I hope to go into medicine and use chemical engineering as a pathway for that. Surprisingly, there aren’t many chemical engineers in medicine but engi-neering is very applicable.”

At Waterloo, Upenieks’ decision to venture into unchartered territory isn’t all that unique. The chemical engineering students are known for pushing boundaries, whether they’re examining the adhesive properties of gecko footpads or creating new ways to detect pathogens using our in-house water treatment plant. With one of Canada’s largest undergraduate programs in chemical engineering, we’ve worked hard to merge theoretical research learning with co-operative education.

Both students and employers say it’s Waterloo’s world-renowned co-op program — the first of its kind in Canada — that creates success. There’s a 90 percent hire

rate, buoyed by career-counselling support, and students graduate with two years of paid job experience. All engineering students must participate in six co-op terms and become active employees in corporations, small businesses, non-profits and govern-ment offices.

Unlike other internship programs where students work for one employer, Waterloo believes in giving students room to explore through diverse work terms with different employers. Some of the co-op students do return to the same company term after term because they are given progressively more challenging work.

Ideas generated on those work terms are often brought back to the university and incubated. Waterloo’s unique intellec-tual property policy enables the inventor to own their idea and have the freedom to launch entrepreneurial ventures that showcase their innovation.

The program also helps potential employers get a better sense of who they might eventually hire. This is particularly important for companies such as Hatch Ltd., a professional services firm for the mining, metallurgical, energy and infra-structure sectors with project experience in over 150 countries. Hatch has hired about 200 Waterloo co-op students since 2004. Amar Grewal, the company’s talent acquisition manager, explains that in the war for talent, competition for excellent chemical engineering grads comes not just from its own direct competitors but from technology and financial services firms, too. “I love that the chemical engi-neering education is flexible and can be

By Christine Moresoli

applied in various Hatch sectors,” Grewal says. “Their skills are highly transferrable since students have a deep education in mathematics, material science, chemistry and physics.”

It’s estimated that 10 percent of all working chemical engineers in Canada today graduated from Waterloo. Knowing our influence, we’re cognizant that we must stay current and address industry’s challenges, whether we’re building more process safety and life sciences into the curriculum, or updating labs in our 10,684 square metres of new space.

That ability for students to develop a hands-on and visual experience with the latest equipment, combined with their theoretical studies, means new graduates are entering their fields prepared to make a significant contribution from the start of their careers. Upenieks has found that to be true already. During one of his co-op terms at a pure chemistry lab, his employer asked him to repair an evaporator unit. Undaunted, Alex thought back to what he learned in his thermodynamics, materials science and fluid mechanics courses and developed a plan. It worked. “I couldn’t imagine being successful in that task without having an understanding of chemical engi-neering,” Upenieks says. “That knowledge helped me immensely.”

Christine Moresoli is the associate dean, Co-operative Education & Professional

Affairs for the Faculty of Engineering at the University of Waterloo. Visit uwaterloo.

ca/hire to learn more about the co-operative education program or to hire a student.

Co-ops give engineering grads a career boost


Guest Column

in 1996 I joined the Canadian Chemical Producers Association, now the Chemistry Industry Association of Canada (CIAC). That was the best

career decision I ever made for me and for my family.

During the past 19 years I have been fortunate to work with industry leaders who were dedicated to the development of a sustainable chemistry industry in Canada and to our global leadership in Responsible Care (RC). I was also fortunate to follow a great leader, Jean Bélanger, widely recog-nized as one of the founders of RC, who helped establish CIAC as an association that always worked well with stakeholders and governments to “do the right thing.”

As you know, RC is the chemistry industry’s continuing commitment to the betterment of society, the environment and the economy through the produc-tion of safer and sustainable products and processes. Every CIAC member-company supports and upholds the principles and ethics of RC including community engagement and transparent third-party verification. In fact, some CIAC members are now on their seventh verification and continue to innovate in their management practices, sustainability initiatives and work with communities.

After 30 years, one might expect the enthusiasm and dedication for RC to atrophy. It has not. In fact, the everyday commitment by CIAC industry members to the core principles has never wavered. And from that solid foundation the initia-tive has been able to remain adaptable, flexible and relevant to changing needs.

By Richard Paton

When it became clear that society was demanding its businesses act in more sustainable and environmentally friendly ways, the association’s members took another significant leap in 2009 and incor-porated sustainability principles into RC.

This change to integrate sustainability into RC was timely and important. It improved the overall vitality of RC and its alignment with community expectations. The innovations by members that resulted were inspiring and continue to this day.

RC has enabled CIAC to be accepted as a leader in sustainability as evidenced by the conferring in 2014 of the GLOBE Leadership Award, which recognizes the commitment to sustainability of Canadian companies, to the association. It has also enabled us to work with communities and governments who trust our performance and know we are committed to the envi-ronment. This license to operate is now more critical in an age of active communi-cations and social media. Other industrial sectors have not followed this path and they have paid the price in terms of public credibility and acceptance with serious economic consequences.

Notwithstanding the continuous evolu-tion of the industry and the challenges of dealing with different government agendas, CIAC has maintained a laser focus on two interrelated movements: promoting invest-ment and growth opportunities for the sector in Canada and the enhancing of RC and its sustainability agenda.

Make no mistake, it is not easy to attract and maintain major chemical invest-ments in Canada. All the business factors:

Reflections on 19 years of leadership at the CIAC

transportation networks, taxes, electricity, labour force requirements and regulations, have to align properly.

On the contrary, good business practices in the 21st century mean being respon-sible and responsive. It means working for solutions that enhance the potential for investment and growth and the principles of RC. In my 19 years as president, CIAC members never wavered from this two-pronged core belief in how to do business in Canada.

In 1996, CCPA members produced shipments in the range of $10 billion. Last year, CIAC members made $20 billion worth of products that were shipped to customers and clients in Canada and around the world. We continue, and will for some time to come, to be the sector that serves as the link that takes Canada’s abundant natural resources and turns them into highly innovative and differentiated prod-ucts that Canadians rely on each and every day.

I will miss working with this amazing asso-ciation and the companies that belong to CIAC but l know the association is in good hands with my successor, Bob Masterson, and the leaders of our industry.

Richard Paton retires Dec. 1 as president and CEO of the Chemistry Industry Association of

Canada (CIAC). SCI Canada, the business forum of the Chemical Institute of Canada,

honoured Paton with the 2014 Canada Medal for outstanding service to the Canadian chem-

istry industry. He teaches management courses in Carleton University’s Masters Program in

Public Policy and Administration.


Election 2015

well, it’s finally over — for now. The 2015 federal elec-tion results are in with a new majority Liberal government.

What does it all mean for the future of science in this country?

First, a word about what happened. Science received more than its usual due for an electoral campaign. Readers will have noticed an unusual amount of attention given to federal science, more specifically the muzzling of government scientists and the use of evidence in deci-sion making. This was different from past campaigns. Grass roots science move-ments have sprung up to shine a beacon on the silencing issue — unprecedented in Canadian science policy history. Evidence

By Paul Dufour

for Democracy, the Canadian Association of University Teachers’ Get Science Right and the Science Integrity Project, for example, have provided platforms to publicize the issue and to offer solutions. Aided by surveys from the Professional Institute for the Public Service (PIPSC), the chilling of public-interest science has received considerable media attention, both here and abroad.

The federal parties running against the Conservatives all made

room in their platforms for improved science governance, ranging from a new Parliamentary Science Officer to the rein-statement of a national science adviser to the return of the long-form census. Pledges to increase funding to the Industrial Research Assistance Program (IRAP), the granting councils and health research, were also made.

On the innovation front, the parties have made promises to improve incentives, including tax credits for venture capital and R&D to selected funding to strategic sectors or clusters of the economy.

Science and innovation always receive some attention in these campaigns. Continuous partial attention is to be expected. With no natural constituency, science and innovation remain marginal as headline topics. Even the announcement of the latest Nobel Prize to a Canadian in physics was a mere ripple in the media’s and general public’s eyes.

But to the extent that science and inno-vation impact on the everyday lives of Canadians, that is when knowledge does and should matter. A powerful narra-tive from all sectors that makes clear why research and knowledge contributes to our health, our education and training,

Mapping science’s post-election future in Canada

our culture, our environment and our economic well-being is ultimately what can make a difference to the voting public. It has been missing.

We now have a new majority govern-ment in Ottawa. The Liberal party has made promises to fund a $200 million innovation agenda with a focus on tech-nology incubators and national network for business innovation and cluster support, research facilities and small-business assistance. In valuing and respecting scien-tists, it also commits to a chief science officer, restoring the long-form census and pledging to the use of accurate data in deci-sion-making. A centrepiece is $300 million annually over the next four years for clean technologies and clean-tech manufacturing in the natural resources (forestry, mining, fisheries, energy and agriculture).

The Liberals have also committed to restore funding for freshwater research as well as make new investments in the Experimental Lakes Area. The party prom-ised to devote $200 million over the next four years to ocean science and monitoring. Also pledged was an annual increase in the popular IRAP budget to the tune of $100 million.

There is a longer game, however. We will need a national vision that is collaborative with other governments in moving forward on a new agenda for a Canada that will be 150 years old in 2017. We should expect the scientific leadership in this country to come to the plate and deliver alongside the grass roots groups that have emerged. And we need an entrepreneurial and private sector that starts taking its responsibilities seriously about investing in the next frontier. Only then will Canada’s knowledge future be a true nation-building ‘projet de société’.

Paul Dufour is a Fellow and adjunct professor, Institute for Science, Society and Policy,

University of Ottawa.


Intellectual Matters

next year marks an important anniversary in chemical history. In 1916, Gilbert Lewis published his seminal paper on chemical

bonding, “The Atom and the Molecule,” from which were born Lewis dot struc-tures. The year 2016 then, marks the 100th anniversary of Lewis’s concept of the covalent bond model and electron pairs. Only 100 years ago, chemists and physi-cists were still trying to understand the basic building blocks of molecules. Today, with advanced computing and machines like the large hadron collider, scientists are continually pushing the boundaries of human knowledge.

Patents are often thought to contain subject matter that is cutting edge. The United States Patent and Trademark Office, for example, recently granted a patent to Airbus for a plane that could fly between New York City and London in one hour. What happens, though, when the science is so cutting edge that patent laws and procedure aren’t yet equipped to handle these new inventions?

I recently attended a lecture that had me thinking through such a scenario. The lecture was on the use of pharmacophore models in drug design research, in which advanced computing is used to search for chemical structures and predict a chosen biological activity. For example, a chemist may employ computational chemistry to search for chemical structures that fit within the binding pocket of the angiotensin converting enzyme (ACE). While the use of computers in drug discovery has been known for some time, the accuracy with which these super computers can predict the activity of a particular compound will even-tually have significant consequences in the chemical patent field.

Today, most chemical patents which are directed to compositions of matter follow

By Mike Fenwick

the same paradigm: disclo-sure of the preparation or synthesis of a new compound or material, followed by tests on the compound that provide evidence that the compound or material possesses the intended prop-erties. In a patent for a new pharmaceutical, the patent will likely contain a synthetic procedure for the preparation of the compound and an in vitro test, for example, which demonstrates that the drug inhibits a certain enzyme. Likewise, a patent for a new polymer will also contain a synthetic procedure, followed by a particular test that could indicate that the new polymer has the desired increased tensile strength. Trying to convince a patent examiner that the new compound or polymer has the stated utility without the specific experiments to support that utility is an uphill battle.

With the use of computational chem-istry and pharmacophore modelling, the paradigm could begin to shift. However, there are a multitude of issues that will arise as this type of research and development becomes the subject of more and more patent applications. A pharmacophore, for example, as defined by the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry, is “an ensemble of steric and electronic features that is necessary to ensure the optimal supramolecular interactions with a specific biological target and to trigger (or to block) its biological response.” In other words, a pharmacophore is an abstract collection of a molecule’s features that provide a desired biological response. Yet most countries prohibit the patenting of abstract ideas. The Canadian Patent Act

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Cutting-edge discoveries outstrip patent laws

states that “no patent shall be granted for any mere scientific principle or abstract theorem.” Accordingly, trying to claim abstract notions of combined molecular interactions could be problematic from the perspective of whether it constitutes patentable subject matter.

The desired breadth of such patents will also become a contentious issue. For example, a pharmacophore model may determine that a hydrophobic region at a certain moiety is necessary for activity. The inventor may therefore try to claim “any hydrophobic moiety” on the molecule that binds to a specific location on the biolog-ical target. While this may be supported by the pharmacophore model, it brings ambi-guity into the patent as to what is actually protected. If you asked 100 chemists what constitutes a hydrophobic moiety, I suspect you would receive many different answers. And patent offices and courts do not like ambiguity.

Mike Fenwick is a patent lawyer with Bereskin and Parr LLP in Toronto and holds

a master’s degree in organic chemistry.

Mapping science’s post-election future in Canada


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By Tim Lougheed

BIOCHEMISTRY

Velcro inspires new bonding system for 3D heart cells However much it sounds like science fiction, we can envision the day when clinicians will be able to synthesize replacements for almost any part of our bodies using hardware little more complex than an ink jet printer. Already this technology can be used to generate swatches of skin from a patient’s own cells so that the resulting material could be grafted onto a wound with no risk that the body will try to reject it. In much the same way, it might even be possible to construct entirely new organs to stand in for those that are damaged or failing.

As enticing as that vision may be, perhaps nowhere will it be more difficult to realize than in the heart, where hard-working cells beat ceaselessly throughout all the decades of our lives. Replacing even a part of this organ will be a tricky business, with little leeway for allowing synthetic cells to integrate with surrounding tissue. If the replacement cannot stand up to the rigours of the job right away, this intervention could make an individual’s heart problems even worse.

Boyang Zhang began thinking seriously about this challenge when his PhD work took him to Milica Radisic’s University of Toronto laboratory, which is well on the way to creating strings of functional heart cells. Such strings have little practical applica-tion and thin cellular meshes would not be sufficiently robust for the task. However, they could be built up to form the necessary strength and stiffness required for healthy heart tissue. “The logical next step is a two-dimensional mesh structure made up of multiple fibres that are just connected together,” says Zhang. These layers of mesh could be stacked on top of each other and the various layers would eventually integrate, he adds.

The resulting three-dimensional structures could then be inserted into a working heart. This kind of flexible arrangement would address some of the greatest challenges that would confront a surgeon trying to repair the heart, where the ultimate shape and

structure of the replacement tissue will only be determined once it is in place and actively working. However, the insertion offers little time for the various components to combine into a functional whole, as the heart cannot simply be stopped long enough for this bonding process to take place. Zhang and his colleagues therefore mimicked the intricate design of the material bonding system in Velcro, where extended fibres sticking out from two surfaces link strongly with one another. In this case, each layer of heart cells would be designed with a series of T-shaped hooks that could reach into an adjacent layer and attach firmly. “With this mechanical locking mechanism we link them together,” Zhang says. “Although we grow the cells in each mesh individually, the moment we stack them together and lock them in place as a whole they are immediately functional.”

The ability to assemble and disassemble such meshes with relative ease also offers researchers the possibility of exploring important questions such as how cell viability or gene expression vary with the thickness of the array and other conditions that might be associated with surgical implantation.

This accomplishment, which was published in Science Advances this past August, currently remains at the level of manual produc-tion rather than the automated, ink jet printer style of output. Nevertheless, Zhang and Radisic are confident that the idea is worth pursuing as a means of bringing the advantages of tissue engi-neering to the demanding field of cardiac care. In the meantime, they are left with the additional challenge of what to call their innovation. Although the article uses the term “Tissue-Velcro,” Radisic worries that this will conjure up images of surgeons inserting into their patients the same sort of carpet-like tape that is routinely found in our households. “We’re trying to come up with a better name,” says Radisic, “one that would be uniquely associated with our invention.”

Chemical News Canada’s top stories from the chemical sciences and engineering sectors


Canada's top stories in the chemical sciences and engineering | Chemical News

Mopping up a diesel fuel spill is never easy, especially at the world’s most north-erly habitation on Ellesmere Island, where spring, summer and fall are over in about eight weeks and the ground remains frozen the rest of the year. Nevertheless, members of the Department of National Defence (DND) and the National Research Council of Canada (NRC) successfully tackled this challenge by recruiting bacteria found in that same soil.

The problem started in 2006 when damage to a new fuel pipeline near the airfield at Canadian Forces Station Alert (CFS Alert) spilled some 22,000 litres of DF-8. Fast work with heavy equip-ment built trenches to contain the liquid and kept it from running into the nearby ocean, creating a pile of about 3,700 cubic metres of contaminated soil.

Dealing with that pile — and others like it — fell to Drew Craig, the 8 Wing Environmental Management Officer at CFB Trenton. Craig and his small team are responsible for five DNC sites across the country, including CFS Alert, where they had already been struggling with how to remediate soils in this extreme setting.

In warmer, more fertile locations, a healthy dose of fertilizer can prompt bacteria in soil

A bit of fertilizer goes a long way at the top of the world

ENVIRONMENTAL CHEMISTRY

to slowly and steadily consume diesel fuel. However, earlier attempts to stimulate such activity at Alert had failed to do so. Craig’s group had already been working on remedia-tion strategies with researchers at the NRC’s Energy, Mining and Environment program in Montreal, so they began to collaborate on a different approach for this latest spill. “Given the fact that soil in the far North is very poor in terms of its nutrient content, it made sense to the NRC to experiment with lower concentrations of monoammonium phosphate fertilizer as a starting point,” says Craig. “As it turned out, the optimal concen-tration of fertilizer to soil is about a tenth of that which would be used to treat soil in southern Canada.”

According to NRC research officer David Juck, this finding illustrates how dramatically the parameters for bacterial remediation can vary from one type of soil to the next. In each case, the key is identifying the balance of parameters, such as nutrient load, oxygen concentrations and pH that will be necessary for those bacteria to thrive. “When we’re going into these sites we’re really trying to re-establish the balance that was there prior to the contamination event,” he says. “In most systems it’s a nice balance between the ratio of carbon to nitrogen to

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Contaminated earth at Canadian Forces Station Alert is piled up in preparation for cleaning by bacteria found in the soil.

phosphorus. Once you have a diesel gas spill, you skew that ratio to significantly more carbon. The nitrogen and phosphorus are consumed very quickly and bacteria wind up with a nutrient deficit.”

Although the calculations to correct that deficit were a complicated affair, the final steps were as simple as flying bags of store-bought fertilizer into Alert and spreading it along windrows of contaminated soil. That process began in 2007 and eight years later — which amounts to about a year of non-frozen biological activity — the job is finally done.

Results from August 2015 indicated that F-2 hydrocarbon concentrations in the biopile soil were below Canadian Council of Minister of the Environment criteria. The clean soil will be returned to the site of origin, Craig says.

This accomplishment introduces a new way of dealing with contamination in the Arctic, where treatment options have been fairly limited. Juck also points out that this work serves as an important reminder that environmental matters can often be best handled with the biological resources that are available close by. “Who better to address these issues than the bacteria that are naturally present on this site?”



CATALYST DISTRIBUTION

Paul Chirak, a Princeton University researcher specializing in catalysts for new methods of chemical synthesis, has turned to GreenCentre Canada for help in commercializing products he has been developing. GreenCentre, an organization based in Kingston, Ont., was established to assist Canadian academics with this kind of work, but Princeton’s interest in this same kind of service reveals that it meets a need that is not being addressed in the United States. “You’d think with all the resources and all the people in the US that this would be something that exists,” says Andrew Pasternak, GreenCentre’s Director of Commercialization and Business Development. “But it’s pretty clear that it doesn’t — GreenCentre is unique in this respect.”

Through an agreement with the Princeton University Office of Technology Licensing, GreenCentre Canada will apply its commercial and technical expertise, access to industrial networks and laboratory facilities to accelerate the progress of Chirak’s catalysts to make them ready for market.

“GreenCentre is very pleased to have the opportunity to work with the high level of researchers at Princeton University and assist them in getting their catalysts to be used by industry,” GreenCentre executive director Pete Pigott said in a formal announcement on the deal. “These technologies being developed at Princeton have the potential to offer real sustainable solutions to the fine chemical industry.”

GreenCentre’s scale-up capacity drawing US chemistsGreenCentre was recently renewed as part of the federal

government’s Centres of Excellence for Commercialization and Research program to continue this work with members of the academic community as well as build similar bridges with entre-preneurs and larger enterprises in the chemical sector. Among other activities, the organization’s Kingston facilities offer researchers the ability to scale up the output of their laboratory efforts from a matter of milligrams or millilitres to the kilogram or kilolitre amounts necessary for potential industrial partners to take stock of its commercial potential.

According to Pasternak, an even more important role for GreenCentre is putting researchers in touch with their counter-parts in the private sector. “The hard part is finding the correct technical people in industry who make the decisions for catalysts, who can use it and try it,” he says.

In this respect, establishing such a network for Chirak also represents a much larger opportunity for GreenCentre, which will now be conducting this process in a much wider setting.

“When we’re promoting these catalysts that come from the US, we get to know who the players are in the US and globally,” says Pasternak. “That knowledge is invaluable. The more catalysts we bring in, the more people get exposed to GreenCentre. That can help GreenCentre in all its catalyst distribution efforts, no matter where it comes from.

REGULATIONS

CSChE backs new process safety management standard The Canadian Society for Chemical Engineering (CSChE) has successfully turned the Process Safety Management Standard (PSM) it developed three years ago into the Canadian Standards Association’s first national standard. The achievement addresses a need in Canada, which is one of the few Western countries without prescriptive legislation and regulations.

“Process Safety Management is the application of manage-ment principles and systems to the identification, understanding and control of process hazards to prevent process-related injuries and accidents — that’s the starting definition,” says University of Toronto chemical engineer Graeme Norval, who chaired the project group that undertook the initiative earlier this year. Norval says that the group was made up of a diversity of people who brought the perspectives of their various industries and government departments to these deliberations, so that

the language and meaning of the resulting standard would be as universally applicable as possible. For example, the condition “loss of containment” could mean a pipeline leak to the operator of a chemical plant or a rock collapse in the shaft of a mining site. “You have to understand all the process hazards and the process risks,” Norval says. “It’s a performance-based standard so it’s smaller than the CSChE standard in terms of length. But it’s very precise in what the elements are that you need to have.”

The financial cost to CSChE for developing the CSA stan-dard was $140,000, an amount that was successfully supported by companies, industry trade associations and government depart-ments. The final product was sent out for a public review that wrapped up in October and the resulting feedback will be incor-porated over the new few months. Norval estimates that the new standard should be in place by this March or April of 2016.



Just as bad ingredients can make for an unsatisfying and perhaps downright unpleasant meal, bad chemical probes can lead to incorrect or misleading scien-tific outcomes. University of Toronto biochemist Aled Edwards is a staunch advocate of this perspective, so much so that he has spearheaded an initiative to help the research community sort out the quality of probes being used. “We calcu-lated that it’s costing hundreds of millions, likely billions of dollars of investment into results that just aren’t right,” Edwards says, referring to a paper that he and an inter-national group of like-minded colleagues published in Nature Chemical Biology this past August.

Their concern stems from the use of reagents that academic investigators may use to demonstrate and publish a particular finding, when in reality the observation was simply an indirect consequence of a larger suite of chemical interactions. For instance, a protein inhibitor might reveal a response with respect to some condition of interest, such as diabetes, and an ensuing publication will link that particular protein to that particular response. However, Edwards suggests that there might be much more happening. “Sometimes you see a result because you want to see a result,” he says. “You just keep adding compound until you see something. It’s really a slippery slope and easy to do. Perhaps they used a compound that inhibits a hundred different pathways in a cell and saw a change, a completely non-specific phenomenon. But because the chemical was advertised as a specific inhibitor, the connection is made.”

In order to determine the quality of that connection, Edwards adds, it will be necessary to know the qualities of the original probe. That goal is the founda-tion of chemicalprobes.org, a portal that offers information on which probes have been demonstrated as being most useful for specific biological targets, as well as how they should be employed and what

New portal identifies top-quality chemical probes

problems or limitations they might pose. “We want to make this thing indepen-dent,” says Edwards, describing the site as a Wikipedia-based approach to enabling people and institutions with a vested interest in chemical probes to assess how these agents work. This initiative has already received support from the Wellcome Trust in the United Kingdom and formal endorsement from research bodies including the Eli and Edythe L. Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard in Massachusetts, the UK’s Institute of Cancer Research and the international

Structural Genomics Consortium at the University of Toronto.

According to Edwards, it can take a great deal of time and money to design chemical probes with the kind of highly selective properties that make for clear-cut conclu-sions. Since most of these probes originate in academia, those two key resources are often in short supply. That makes the role of this portal all the more crucial, according to Edwards. “We needed to figure out some alternative way to inform the scientific community when a tool is a good one and when a tool is a bad one.”

BIOCHEMISTRY



NUCLEAR CHEMISTRY

Simulating effect of radiation reduces lab hazards

“Protons do a lot,” says Mark Daymond, pointing to a container of hydrogen the size of a coffee thermos that will feed protons into an accelerator the size of a school bus. These protons, Daymond says, will do even more by making it possible to test materials that will sit inside a nuclear reactor without having to go to the trouble of putting them inside a reactor.

Daymond, who holds the NSERC Industrial Research Chair in Nuclear Materials at Queen’s University, explains just how much trouble that can be. Most nuclear reactors are dedicated to the task of producing heat to generate electricity, which means their operational param-eters do not vary. Attempts to study how materials respond to conditions inside the reactor can therefore only take place within those parameters. “You’re very limited in the kinds of tests you can do,” Daymond says. “For instance, it would be difficult to adjust the stress or the tempera-ture or the flux of particles.”

Above all, anything you put into a reactor will be highly radioactive when you take it out to learn more about how it held up under these conditions. That makes every step of the analysis much more demanding and expensive, as samples must be handled remotely in shielded “hot cells.”

In the face of such problems, Daymond and his colleagues at the Queen’s Nuclear Materials Research Group have spent the past few years developing the Reactor Materials Testing Laboratory (RMTL), which will make the task of assessing such materials simpler and safer. The centrepiece of this facility, which is located in an industrial park at the north end of Kingston, Ont., is a linear accel-erator that can deliver beams of protons with energies up to 12 MeV. When those beams are aimed at sample materials such as the zirconium alloys, which are used in the many pipes and tubes that populate a reactor interior, the result will effectively

your flux, essentially. You can control your environment very easily, including stress, temperature or corrosion. And the overall level of radiation can be much lower.”

Queen’s officially opened the RMTL in September, acknowledging a $7 million grant from the Canada Foundation for Innovation, a matching $7 million from the Ontario government and addi-tional support from the university and High Voltage Engineering Europa, the Dutch-based manufacturer of the linear accelerator.

simulate the radiation effects found in that environment. However, the samples them-selves will not be rendered significantly radioactive, which means the RMTL has no need for hot cells or other cumber-some infrastructure for handling hazardous components. Beyond safety and conve-nience, Daymond is looking forward to the lab’s ability to conduct much more varied and revealing tests. “You can control your radiation very carefully,” he says. “You can pick the energy of your particles and the number of particles — you can dial

Mark Daymond, NSERC Industrial Research Chair in Nuclear Materials at Queen's University, beside the accelerator that is the centrepiece of a new materials testing laboratory.

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Making NHL hockey ice is a combination of engineering, chemistry and artistry.

By Roberta Staley

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The Vancouver Canucks were blanked 4-0 by the San Jose Sharks in a pre-season September game on the newly minted ice surface at Rogers Arena.


beside paint cans, filling in the Canuck’s stylized orca logo. It’s a Monday — two days after Rogers Arena rocked out to a Foo Fighters concert. The morning after the concert, crews began cleaning the concrete arena floor (scrapping up chewed gum is one of their more onerous tasks). The key step, however, began even sooner. Immediately after the concert, cold fluids began flowing through a web of piping embedded in the concrete foundation. By Saturday morning, the temperature of the arena floor surface had decreased to –8 C from 22 C — cold enough for ice making to begin. This is not the backyard winter flooding that Canadians remember from childhood. It will take five days to spray 70 layers of water — enough to create a 3.17 centimetre-thick block — onto the arena surface before the Canucks kick off the first practice of the season on home ice.

The ideal temperature for Rogers Arena ice is –6.7 C. Any warmer and a hockey game itself might be impeded, slowing down players and making the puck bounce, rather than glide, across the ice. This brisk temperature is maintained by circulating 22,500 litres of very cold brine water containing calcium chloride as the antifreeze agent through the pipes. During games, the computerized control centre at Rogers Arena is set so that if the ice increases even one degree above the set point, the building’s compressors kick in to start the circulation of refrigerated brine beneath the ice surface. The brine runs through 15,727 metres of steel piping — the approximate distance between Vancouver and the nearby city of Richmond — that is encased

five centimetres below the surface in the 10-centimetre thick concrete floor. It’s not ordinary concrete either, but a special blend that tolerates expansion and contrac-tion caused by fluctuating temperatures, Wohl notes.

In the world of hockey, refrigeration and ice have a long relationship. In 1876, the world’s first refrigerated ice surface opened in London, England. In Canada, two British Columbian brothers, Frank and Lester Patrick, backed by their father Joe’s lumber money, built indoor ice rinks in Vancouver and Victoria in 1911 utilizing a refrigeration system.

Cold concrete means that ice making can begin. A 3.5-metre spray bar is manoeuvered by hand around the 61-metre long and 26-metre wide rink, distributing an even layer of water. The layer is so thin — about 0.8 centimetres — that it freezes virtually instantly. Half a dozen layers of water are sprayed, creating what Wohl calls “black ice” because the dark concrete shows through. In order to make the pris-tine white that contrasts so sharply with the small black puck, helping fans follow the play, the next layer is painted with Jet Ice Super White 3000 paint, specifi-cally formulated to create an intense, bright surface. Once the painting is finished, it is sealed

Is hockey the greatest sport on earth? Few Canadians would disagree. In terms of speed and intensity, hockey is unmatched by any other game. It is also the consummate team sport. A win is impossible unless every player

works together, each athlete giving — as the cliché goes — 110 percent.

But behind each of the National Hockey League’s 30 teams is another, equally important group: the men and women who create and maintain the vast, glit-tering, icy canvas where games are won and lost, blood spilled and history made. At Rogers Arena in downtown Vancouver — home of the Canucks — there is, of course, the rink where the action happens. Encircling it is an area that few fans ever see: a rubber-floored, oval labyrinth that houses dressing rooms, offices and an assortment of machinery, loaders, equip-ment and computer and security stations. This is where the all-important ice making and maintenance happens that ensures not only a fast and fierce game but player safety; athletes can give that 110 percent without risking a career-ending injury from catching a skate in a rut.

It’s mid-September and Al Hutchings, director of engineering with Canucks Sports & Entertainment, walks briskly down the curving hallway. “I love this time of year, it’s so full of promise,” says Hutchings, smiling enigmatically when asked about the Canucks’ prospects for the 2015-2016 NHL season.

Delphic predictions aren’t Hutchings’ forte. Ice, however, is. But when it comes to the minutiae of making a perfect 1,830 square metre polycrystal plane, even Hutchings defers to the man he says the NHL calls whenever a problem with ice arises. This is Mark Wohl, manager of plant operations at Canucks Sports & Entertainment who, at this moment, is standing outside the rink with Hutchings, watching as staff crouch down at centre ice


with several more thin layers of water. The process, says Wohl, “is labour inten-sive. What we’re doing has been the same for years and years. There’s been no real change except for a bit of technology.”

The next step is measuring out the blue and red lines delineating the neutral and

end zones, the faceoff circles and dots, hash marks where the players stand,

goalie creases and the team and corporate sponsorship logos. Circles are painted with a pre-measured circle maker. The painting process, says Wohl, takes about eight hours from start to finish.

Water, of course, is the raw mate-rial that makes the hockey ice. But

can the ice-making team just turn on the tap and start spraying? Vancouver

is known for the purity of its water, which is sourced from three remote natural moun-tain reservoirs: Capilano, Seymour and Coquitlam lakes. Because spring runoff from melting snow packs is quick, the water doesn’t sit on a land surface absorbing minerals such as calcium and magnesium. In comparison, the Calgary Flames use water obtained from sources containing high levels of total displaced solids, which must be removed to optimize that fran-

chise’s hockey ice, Wohl says.

Mark Wohl, the manager of plant operations at Canucks Sports & Entertainment, is considered one of the top hockey ice experts in the NHL.

Despite having fewer minerals in the water than Calgary, Rogers Arena still uses a sand and gravel filter with progres-sively smaller openings of 25 micrometres (µm), one µm and 0.5 µm to remove possible impurities. (Other teams, like the Winnipeg Jets, use reverse osmosis to purify their water.) Once the reservoir water exits the filtering system, it is too pure to create hockey ice and minerals must be added, says Wohl. Without minerals, the ice will be too hard, making it difficult for the athletes to get traction. So why go through all the trouble of filtering them out? Because ice becomes soft if there is an overabundance of minerals, leaving it vulnerable to the shred-ding of players’ skates. To achieve the ideal balance, the best solution is to strip out the natural minerals, then add them back in at a composition and concentration that can be controlled. “We use a chemical that we have developed which I can’t divulge,” says Wohl. “It’s like Colonel Sanders’ secret herbs and spices.” This chemical cocktail, called Right Ice, works so well that the Canucks franchise sells the mixture to other rinks with the same problem, Wohl says, admitting that the ingredients are so basic they are available on store shelves.

Finding the perfect mix of minerals and water is only one step to creating ice. The real work is done by the impres-

sive mechanics of the refrigeration system. At Rogers Arena,

the refrigeration plant is almost new, replaced

a year ago at a cost of $1.4 million,

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Chemical Engineering | Ice Hockey

says Wohl, dressed in the working man’s uniform of jeans, leather boots and safety reflector vest. “The original system was 20 years old, so we thought we might as well bite the bullet and rebuild it.” Like many NHL rinks, anhydrous ammonia (NH3) is the coolant used in the refrigeration system at Rogers Arena. (Some NHL rinks use halocarbon, or Freon, says Wohl.) It is stored under pressure in closed containers before being pumped into a tube-and-shell heat exchanger with the calcium chloride brine on the other side. When the pressure is released, the NH3 evaporates (at atmo-spheric pressure, ammonia boils at –33 C) and absorbs heat from the brine, causing its temperature to drop.

The heat exchanger is strong enough to bring temperatures down to –16 C. (The calcium chloride (CaCl2) in the brine

water prevents it from freezing.) During a game, two pumps constantly circulate brine through the refrigeration system, says Steve Good, who is part of the ice mainte-nance crew that also includes Steve Caron, Keith Fong, Wade McLennan and Gavin Hamblin. Advances in refrigeration tech-nology meant that when the system was upgraded a year ago, the amount of NH3 needed for cooling the brine was reduced to 680 kilograms from 2,040 kilograms, Good says. This reduction means that the system is safer than the original one, when NH3 gas was stored on the roof. Today the refrig-eration unit, which sits two floors below rink level, is a closed system. “No ammonia can leave the room,” Good says. NH3 leaks, while extremely rare, are dangerous because the gas burns mucous membranes. In 2011, an NH3 gas leak at the North Shore Winter

Club in North Vancouver left Olympic silver medal figure skater and coach Karen Magnussen permanently disabled.

George Agnes, an analytical chemist from Simon Fraser University, says that refrigeration, in combination with the laborious process of layering the water, is what turns the ice into a smooth, clean “amorphous solid,” with layers that are “really well bound to each other, resulting in a single piece of ice.” The freezing of the water is a bottom-up process. This means that the cold emanating from below the ice freezes the bottom first, allowing gases dissolved in the water such as oxygen and carbon dioxide to be expelled during the freezing process and released into the atmosphere. This leaves the sheet of ice clear and free of frozen pockets of entrained gases. Agnes recalls

Once several layers of ice are created, followed by a layer of bright white paint, then Steve Caron can get to work

painting a perfect faceoff circle. After creating the lines and logos, crews will work for another two days spraying water

layers to create the final smooth polycrystal plane.

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Chemical Engineering | Ice Hockey

his childhood days in Ontario, when his dad would create an outdoor rink by hosing down a portion of the driveway. Here, the freezing would come from the top down, as the atmosphere was colder than the ground on which the ice sheet was created. During the freezing process, those same dissolved gases became trapped in pockets under the shell of ice forming more quickly on top. “Wicked potholes were created so we always had to wear padding so that when we fell over these things we wouldn’t hurt ourselves. My dad tried to convince us that it made us better skaters,” says Agnes. If similar imper-fections were present at Rogers Arena — even if they were small — the ice could possibly shatter in places, he adds.

Once the 82-game, regular season starts, maintaining the ice is an ongoing challenge. Every game, at least 0.5 centi-metres of the 3.17 centimetre-deep ice is ground off by the two teams of powerfully

built men flying along on steel blade skates at speeds nearly equal to that of a racehorse. But the gruelling games don’t present the only challenge to ice mainte-nance and Rogers Arena faces some that are unique to the NHL. For perfect ice, the stadium should be kept at 40 percent humidity, with the ice surface never going above –6 C. In Vancouver during hockey season — which coincides with the rainy season — outdoor humidity stays above 80 percent. It is virtually impossible, says Wohl, to maintain optimum humidity when the arena doors open and more than 18,000 fans surge inside. To counter this, Rogers Arena blasts its air conditioning system (there are no de-humidifiers in the building), opening the dampers to let humidity out, preventing the formation of fog on the ice.

The role that the ice resurfacing machine plays in ice maintenance can’t be forgotten, says Agnes. And, once again,

temperature is key. (Rogers Arena uses Olympias instead of the iconic Zamboni for resurfacing.) In NHL and commu-nity rinks, the ice resurfacer — Olympia or Zamboni — scrapes away a thin layer of ice about 0.2 to 0.4 centimetres thick between periods, says Agnes. The lost ice is replaced with water at about 75 C, which melts the first few layers of ice. The temperature allows the water to flow across the surface of the underlying ice, filling in ruts and holes and resulting in a smooth surface once again. “If they used cold water, it might freeze too quickly,” Agnes says.

A flawless block of NHL ice is a thing of beauty. Keeping it that way requires a dedicated team whose artistry, patience, experience and vigilance preserve this clear, white cold canvas as the perfect foun-dation for a hockey team’s long and arduous journey to the ultimate NHL goal — the Stanley Cup.

Steve Good works in the refrigeration plant at Rogers Arena, which is a closed system to prevent ammonia gas leaks. Rogers Arena uses anhydrous ammonia (NH3) as the coolant for absorbing heat from the brine circulating under the rink in order to sustain a perfect ice surface.

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By Tim Lougheed

New Prescription NEOMED Institute of Montreal is attracting both public and private investors to re-energize and streamline the drug discovery process.

New Prescription


Chemistry | Pharmaceuticals

Chemisty | Pharmaceuticals

sometimes portrayed as fat cats turning out drugs on billion-dollar budgets. The reality is somewhat harsher: these corporate giants have traditionally spent a great deal of time and money exploring the pharmaceutical potential of various compounds only to end, as the process usually does, in failure. A high failure rate is ultimately essential to the success of any kind of drug discovery — the better to avoid bringing an unsafe or inef-fective drug to market — but the associated financial risks have become profound, which is why this corporate sector has worked so hard to reorganize and in some cases rein-vent the way it does business.

AstraZeneca’s abandonment of its Montreal digs reflected just this kind of corporate realignment. And although that is no longer where the company directly engages in the grass roots search for new drugs, the building is home to more of this activity than ever before.

The driving force that has maintained this research momentum is the NEOMED Institute, a not-for-profit body that has brought public and private investors into the most fundamental biological and chemical aspects of the drug discovery process. The organization now over-sees some $90 million worth of funding and in-kind contributions that include partnerships with universities, hospi-tals and major pharmaceutical firms, including AstraZeneca, Pfizer, Janssen and GlaxoSmithKline.

NEOMED’s business model is premised on bridging the often profound divide that separates the commercialization of new drugs from the basic scientific research that reveals the raw materials that make up those drugs. Although the organiza-tion’s website and printed literature are illustrated with images of famous bridges from around the world, the analogy is more

Strategically wedged between the many lanes of the Trans-Canada Highway and Pierre Elliott Trudeau International

Airport at the west end of the island of Montreal, the Saint-Laurent Campus of Technoparc Montréal is this city’s bid to establish a world-beating concentration of research-intensive industries. The land was set aside for this purpose in the late 1980s and addresses have steadily filled up with high tech enterprises big and small. The first international resident arrived in 1996, as the Swedish pharmaceutical firm Astra spent $330 million to build and develop an ambitious facility that would house nearly every aspect of the drug discovery process, from fundamental chemistry and biology to advanced testing on animals.

Within a few years Astra had merged with the British multinational Zeneca as giants of the global pharmaceutical industry began to grapple with the growing difficulties of finding new products to bring to market. Such mergers led to a surplus of research capacity and a subsequent trend to reduce the size of operations around the world. A number of the affected sites were in Montreal, including AstraZeneca’s in Technoparc Montréal, which shut its doors at the end of 2012.

The story could easily have ended there, with a fully outfitted 12,500 square-metre building sitting empty on a piece of prime real estate. Today, however, the parking lot is full. About 200 people work in this building on various aspects of drug discovery or development — about a third more than AstraZeneca ever employed there. Several are former AstraZeneca staff members who took up the challenge of finding new ways of turning pharmaceu-tical prospects into marketable products.

That challenge has proved to be vexing for the major players in this field, who are

A protein purification system used by researchers at Montreal’s NEOMED Institute.

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Chemistry | Pharmaceuticals

The Quebec government was one of the prime movers behind the creation of NEOMED at the end of 2012, just as AstraZeneca was preparing to leave Technoparc Montréal. The company’s parting gift was the building and most of its installed equipment, which enabled the new organization to hit the ground running with a ready-made headquarters.

Even more importantly, AstraZeneca transferred ownership of some of its advanced research projects, thereby providing NEOMED with a similarly ready-made scientific agenda. Several of these projects are approaching the point of clinical testing, which might never have happened if no one had been there to continue the work.

Philippe Walker, NEOMED’s chief scientific officer, has a favourite example of the progress that has taken place: a compound that goes by the name NEO6860. It is what pharmaceutical researchers call an antagonist, which means that it stymies the normal operation

than colourful rhetoric. The need to span this gap has become a priority critical to the survival of the pharmaceutical industry, which now enthusiastically supports external researchers who can share the risks of studying complex chemicals that may be able to work wonders within the even more complex human body.

As if that mandate weren’t daunting enough, NEOMED has also committed itself to building up the business and tech-nology ecosystem that nurtures the top researchers it needs. In addition to housing the industrial expertise of its own staff, the building has also invited other busi-nesses to set up shop under the same roof. These independent companies include small start-ups specializing in areas such as medicinal chemistry, biological testing and pharmacokinetics, as well as a law firm specializing in biotechnology and intellec-tual property. They likewise benefit from access to a corporate facility outfitted with everything from impressive boardrooms to an outstanding cafeteria.

of biochemical channels in the body to gain some medical advantage. In this case, NEO6860, which acts at the TRPV1 ion channel, interferes with one of the mecha-nisms that generate the painful symptoms of diseases such as osteoarthritis.

This ion channel is well known, but previous efforts to shut it down have met with unacceptably severe side effects, including an increase in body temperature and dangerous impairment of an individu-al’s ability to feel heat. Over the last decade, Walker says, AstraZeneca’s Montreal opera-tion had been working on an entirely new approach based on selective blocking of the ion channel. “We found a compound that blocks only the capsaicin activation but doesn’t block pH or heat activation, unlike other compounds that were tested before,” he says, noting that these features should prevent side effects. (Capsaicin is the active ingredient in hot chili peppers.)

Walker’s own background illustrates the rich brain trust that now populates the robust infrastructure that NEOMED inher-ited. “The site is like a giant toolbox for us to advance programs,” he says.

Walker, who worked for AstraZeneca in Montreal from the early 1990s until 2012, once led the company’s worldwide neuroscience drug discovery efforts, over-seeing about 650 researchers in Canada, Sweden and the United States. Among those researchers was Andrew Griffin, an AstraZeneca chemist who counts himself as being among the last handful of people still working in the building at the end of 2012. Griffin was part of the team that discovered NEO6860 and is excited to be seeing it through to what should be a commercial future.

Griffin appreciates Walker’s compar-ison of NEOMED to a multidisciplinary toolbox that can move the results of pure science toward the realm of applied clin-ical investigation. Nevertheless, he is fond of admitting some bias toward the value of his own discipline in overcoming the

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A compound purification system that employs liquid chromatography to prepare samples for more detailed analysis at Montreal’s NEOMED Institute.


Chemisty | Pharmaceuticals

fundamental difficulties associated with any drug discovery project. “This process fails for a number of different reasons,” Griffin says. “The biology of the human body may not accommodate what a new drug is supposed to do; new approaches may prove to show no additional benefit compared to successful agents on the market doing the same thing; or there may be some problem with pharma-cokinetics, or unwanted side effects. In many cases these issues come down to the mole-cule itself, meaning it’s the responsibility of the chemist who designs these molecules in the first place.”

In this light, it should come as no surprise that the search for drugs comes with a high price tag. Griffin’s former boss at AstraZeneca, Bill Brown, still works just down the hall from him and echoes this assessment. “The easy stuff’s been done,” says Brown. “It’s getting harder to find drugs, to do science. The targets are more difficult, the chemistry is more difficult. It becomes more expensive and it’s a risky business to

start with. And at the end of the day big pharma has stockholders to answer to.”

NEOMED has its own bills to pay, but its mission departs from the traditional business model. As opposed to a single corporate entity taking on all the risk to bring a new product to market, an invest-ment shared by public and private sector partners reduces the cost of such risk. The building itself is home to a wide variety of firms, so the necessary help might be no more than a staircase away.

In this way NEOMED has provided hope to researchers looking for ways across that unwelcome expanse that separates their promising ideas and inventions from the rigid economics and regulations of the pharmaceutical marketplace. For example, although the organization’s AstraZeneca site originally specialized in work on pain relief, the launch of NEOMED soon attracted the attention of people working at a vaccine development site operated by GlaxoSmithKline in the nearby Montreal

suburb of Laval, which was also slated for closure. The emerging collaboration has enabled that site to stay in business and NEOMED to expand its horizons. “Before that, NEOMED was only able to attack small-molecule drug discovery programs,” says Walker. “But with the expertise we get through that new interaction, we can now develop vaccines or potentially antibodies through our biology program.”

At the same time, Walker points out that NEOMED is not immune to the ruth-less economics of drug development, which still consumes a lot of cash. Attracting private firms to put up some of that cash means cultivating a research environment that is more attractive than anything they could maintain for themselves. “You must have an indigenous innovation capability because that’s what’s going to drive business development,” says Walker. “Big compa-nies will come to you because you’re doing things better, faster and in a more intelligent manner than other places.”

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Nuclear Magnetic Resonance scanning confirms the molecular structure of agents studied at Montreal’s NEOMED Institute.


Business | Nuclear Fission

Worth its salt?

Terrestrial Energy Inc. aims to bring innovation to the staid nuclear industry with its unique design for integrated molten salt reactors.

Terrestrial Energy Inc. aims to bring innovation to the staid nuclear industry with its unique design for integrated molten salt reactors.

By Tyler Irving By Tyler Irving By Tyler Irving



L ast month, David Leblanc made a kind of pilgrimage to Oak Ridge, Tenn. to celebrate the 50th anniversary of a very

special moment in nuclear history. From 1965 until 1969, the United States Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge Laboratory was home to the world’s only functioning molten salt nuclear reactor (MSR). Based on an experimental design very different from what has become the mainstream, to many the Oak Ridge MSR symbolized a rare flourishing of innovation in what is now a very conser-vative nuclear industry. But for Leblanc, it represents something else: not the end of an era, but rather the beginning of a nuclear renaissance.

In the mid 1990s, Leblanc was working on a PhD in physics at the University of Ottawa. His research focused on super-conductors with which he hoped to create ultra-powerful magnetic fields to confine the super-hot hydrogen and helium gases involved in a nuclear fusion reaction. Harnessing fusion, the same process that powers the sun, has long been a dream of alternative energy researchers and science fiction writers alike. But as he researched, Leblanc was surprised to discover that the world of nuclear fission — the opposite of fusion and the basis of all modern nuclear power — was more varied than he had previously realized.

“There were a lot of great ideas that were looked at in the 1950s and 1960s which unfortunately didn’t get a full try-out,” Leblanc says. Among them was

Oak Ridge’s molten salt program, which was eventually cancelled in favour of light water reactors, the design used in most of today’s nuclear power plants. “They were the best fit for a nuclear submarine,” says Leblanc. “They got a head start on everything.” (A third technology, the CANada Deuterium Uranium or CANDU reactor, is used in a few dozen facilities around the world.)

Leblanc’s self-described “innovative mind” became fascinated with the nuclear industry’s brief experiment with novelty. After finishing his PhD, he took a teaching posi-tion at Carleton University and founded a consulting company, Ottawa Valley Research Associates Ltd. For the next decade, the physicist researched fission reactor design, using the Oak Ridge model as his starting point.

Before long, Leblanc found himself giving talks for the Thorium Energy Alliance (TEA). Since 2009, this non-profit group composed of engineers, scientists and concerned citizens has held an annual conference on alternative nuclear technologies. It was at one of these conferences that Leblanc met Simon Irish, a former Wall Street investment manager who had been bitten by the nuclear bug a few years earlier. “I asked myself, ‘what’s the biggest market need over the next 20 years?’ I didn’t need to think about it too long to realize that it’s energy,” says Irish. He rejected green alternatives like wind

David Leblanc, Chief Technology Officer, Terrestrial Energy Inc.

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transformation of fertile materials into fissile materials is called breeding.

Both light-water reactors and CANDUs breed a lot of their own fuel but it’s not enough to replace the uranium-235 that is used up in the reaction; they are there-fore classified as “burner” reactors. Even with the common practice of enriching uranium-235 content from one percent up to five percent, fuel bundles typi-cally only last a year or two. Depleted bundles contain small amounts of fission products and fissile plutonium, which are dangerously radioactive. But more than 95 percent of the material is simply harmless unused uranium-238. Many alternative nuclear proponents are focused on replacing today’s supposedly ineffi-cient “burner” designs with true “breeder”

reactors, which create as much or more fissile fuel than they consume.

Some breeder reactors can do away with uranium altogether. Thorium-232 is also fertile; after capturing a neutron and undergoing a couple of beta decays, it can be transformed into fissile uranium-233. Moreover, thorium is three to four times more abundant than uranium and a lot harder to make into a nuclear weapon. The advantages of breeder reactors, especially those designed to use thorium, drive a lot of the enthusiasm that created groups like the Thorium Energy Alliance.

Leblanc sees things a little differently. “The breeder is an admirable goal but uranium is not in short supply,” he says, pointing out that current reserves are enough to last two centuries or more. In

and solar power for their lack of scalability. “It has to be nuclear,” he says. “The ques-tion is, what type of nuclear?”

Burners versus breeders

Uranium-235 is the primary fuel for modern nuclear reactors. This isotope is fissile, meaning that upon collision with a neutron it breaks up — fissions — into other elements, releasing energy and more neutrons that can continue the chain reac-tion. But uranium-235 is rare, making up less than one percent of all natural uranium. The other 99 percent is uranium-238, which is not fissile but rather fertile; if it gains a neutron of the right energy, it turns into uranium-239, which after a couple of beta decays becomes fissile plutonium-239. The

Terrestrial Energy’s plants are designed with two parallel bays. While one integrated core is providing power, the other can be cooling off for up to seven years. Overhead cranes are used to deliver new cores and to move spent cores to long-term storage.

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his view, the problem with conventional burner plants — typically designed to last 30 years and generate 1,000 megawatts (MW) or more — is not that they’re inef-ficient or unsafe but that they’re extremely expensive to build. And most of that cost comes not from the fuel itself but rather the complex systems needed to safely remove and replace the radioactive fuel bundles every 12 to 20 months.

Leblanc’s key insight was to realize that with molten salts, it is possible to dramati-cally shrink the reactor. His vision calls for an integrated molten salt reactor (IMSR) that only generates about 300 MW, but can do so for seven years without needing to be refuelled. At the end of that time, the entire core — not just the fuel but the pipes, heat exchangers and all other

components — is replaced wholesale with a fresh one. “It is counter-intuitive to many,” says Leblanc. “They say, ‘my god, you’re replacing your whole reactor, how could that be economical?’ ” The answer, he says, is that his integrated reactor has a very simple design that makes up a small fraction of the overall plant cost. Replacing the entire core means no complicated refuelling and no need to ensure that components will last a full three decades before needing maintenance or repair. “It’s a remarkably small penalty to pay and the benefits that come from it are pretty enor-mous,” says Leblanc.

Eleodor Nichita, a professor in the Faculty of Energy Systems and Nuclear Science at the University of Ontario Institute of Technology, agrees. “Banks of such small reactors can be built over time with new ones being added as the old ones are being amortized through the sale of electricity,” he says. The fact that the core only needs replacement every seven years could be especially attractive for remote communities. “Its small initial capital outlay also presents a compelling economic case,” Nichita adds.

How it works

The fuel used in Leblanc’s reactor is the same low-enriched uranium used in light-water or CANDU reactors but in a very different form: a uranium tetrafluoride salt, which is mixed with other fluoride salts like lithium fluoride, potassium fluoride or zirconium fluoride (Leblanc is understandably cagey about the precise formulation). At temperatures higher than about 500 C, these mixtures, called eutectics, become liquid.

The molten salt is pumped through a series of pipes surrounded in graphite. Although the uranium-235 atoms are

constantly fissioning, the neutrons they give off are of such high energy that they are unlikely to be captured by other atoms and breed more fuel. Graphite acts as a moderator, slowing down the neutrons to the point where it makes them more likely to encounter other atoms. This sets off the fission chain reaction at the heart of the process, providing enough heat to keep the salts liquid and much more besides.

The hot salt flows back out of the graphite chamber into a heat exchanger, where it gives up its heat to a secondary fluoride salt that contains no uranium. It is this salt, and only this salt, which flows out of the core to exchange its heat with a conventional steam turbine system. This is a critical advantage; it avoids the challenges of pumping high-pressure water directly into the core as conventional reactors do. The hot salt then re-enters the graphite chamber to start the process over again.

After seven years, the graphite has degraded enough that it’s time to shut the reactor down. While a replacement core is started up in a parallel bay, the first one seamlessly transitions into being a container for any radioactive products of the fission reaction. It can remain where it is for another seven years — enough time for the radioactivity levels to drop signifi-cantly — before being moved to long-term storage in much the same way that current nuclear waste is handled. “The ultimate decommissioning we feel is a very tractable problem,” says Leblanc.

Liquid fuel reactors deal very differently with the central challenge of any reactor design: how to dissipate the intense heat of fission energy. Unlike solid fuel rods, liquid fuels can’t suffer a meltdown because they are already melted. In fact the salt acts as its own coolant, dissipating heat efficiently by convection, rather than relying on the heat exchangers to do all the work in all



a big coal build in the 1960s and 1970s and a lot of those plants are at the end of their operating lives.” he says. “A small modular reactor like ours is the right size to replace these coal-fired power stations. It would be cheaper and better to replace that coal-fired power station with an integral molten salt reactor, rather than using clean coal or natural gas technology.”

Terrestrial’s goal is to get a pilot plant up and running by the middle of the next decade; Irish says it will likely be somewhere in Canada. That means it will need to be licensed and approved by the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission (CNSC), which regulates nuclear power in Canada. Here, technologies like molten salts suffer from their shorter track record. “Since the majority of nuclear standards have been developed specifically for water-cooled tech-nologies, new technology designers need to get involved in standards development to ensure that standards exist to meet their needs,” says CNSC spokesperson Aurele Gervais. “Generally, such information comes from research and development activ-ities, including results from experiments.”

In the near future, the company will likely need to partner with a large engi-neering company to build a non-nuclear mock-up that can be used to demonstrate their safety claims to CSNC’s satisfaction. Still, Terrestrial believes it has an advan-tage in the existence of Oak Ridge. “We feel that our design is not really all that different from the main [Oak Ridge] reactor that ran back in the 1960s,” says Leblanc. Though it was meant to be part of a larger breeder reactor that was never built, the first MSR was a simple burner, of comparable size to Terrestrial’s system. Molten salts are also used in other, non-nuclear systems, such as steel and aluminum production, so there is a body of knowledge about how to work with them.

“There’s going to be a tremendous amount of work for us, but we feel that it’s a pretty well laid out technological develop-ment path that doesn’t require something new to be invented,” says Leblanc. “We’re not trying to be exotic, we’re trying to be as simple we can.”

circumstances. In the IMSR design, decay heat is removed directly from the reactor vessel walls, aided by the natural circula-tion of the liquid fuel salt. Because of the volume of the molten salt and its high heat capacity, the IMSR has a tremendous natural ability to cool itself. “It’s a very elegant, simple reactor,” says Irish. “And there’s a direct linkage between simplicity and cost reduction.”

Making the case

In January 2013, after years of consulting experts and incorporating their feedback into his design, Leblanc decided to quit his job and go into business with Irish.

Their company, Terrestrial Energy Inc., has attracted a number of major players in the nuclear industry. For example, their management team includes former executives with Atomic Energy of Canada Limited (Hugh MacDiarmid) and Westinghouse Electric Company (Robin Rickman), while their international advi-sory board includes a former administrator of the US Environmental Protection Agency (Christine Todd Whitman) and a former Chief Technology Officer of Lockheed Martin (Ray O. Johnson).

In laying out the business case, Irish points out that the potential market is quite different from the one facing conven-tional nuclear plants. “In the US, there was

Terrestrial Energy’s integrated reactor is designed to contain the molten salt fuel during its seven-year lifetime and indefinitely afterwards; the only component that leaves the core is the secondary salt, which contains no uranium. By replacing the entire core, rather than just the fuel, the company hopes to avoid many of the complex and expensive systems required in conventional reactors.

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STAy CONNECTEDJoin the ChemiCal institute of Canada or renew your

membership for 2016.

www.cheminst.ca/membership

* the chemical institute of canada (cic) is the national, not-for-profit, umbrella organization for three constituent societies : the canadian society for chemistry (csc), the canadian society for chemical engineering (csche) and the canadian society for chemical technology (csct). individual chemical scientists , engineers and technologists who join their constituent society are automatically members of the cic. the cic has nearly 6,000 members employed in, or associated with industry, government, academia and other organizations across canada and around the world.


Society News

Judy Fairburn, the executive adviser of Alberta-based Cenovus Energy Inc., offered a surprising perspective of the petroleum industry at the 65th Canadian

Chemical Engineering Conference, held October 4-7 at the Calgary Telus Convention Centre. “The oil sands has changed its mindset,” said Fairburn, whose opening plenary lecture was titled Innovating Innovation. “We know that climate change is the elephant in the room. We know that people ultimately don’t like our product — oil — and we have to fix that,” said Fairburn, who is chair of the Shareholder

Oil industry aiming for zero greenhouse gas emissions

Steering Committee of Canada’s Oil Sands Innovation Alliance (COSIA). “Climate change is one of the greatest global chal-lenges of our time,” added Fairburn, who also serves on the Strategy Steering Group for the CAPP Integrated Oil Sands CEO Council.

The oil industry is responsible for the majority of global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions — the cause of climate change. Although “eliminating GHGs is a really complex problem,” the ultimate objective for the industry is “zero — yes zero — emis-sions from our oil,” Fairburn told delegates at the conference, themed “Shaping Energy

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Technology for the Future.” But the solu-tion isn’t the elimination of petroleum, said Fairburn, who has an MSc in chemical engi-neering and an MBA. Rather, the challenge is preventing emissions from entering the atmosphere. If chemical engineers need moti-vation beyond helping slow climate change, there is the US $20 million NRG COSIA Carbon XPRIZE, announced at the end of September, to be awarded for technologies that convert CO2 emissions into valuable products. “We can’t throw up our hands and give up,” Fairburn said.

Other plenary speakers at the four-day conference, which attracted more than 1,000 delegates from 27 countries, included James Tour of Rice University in Texas, the R.S. Jane Memorial Award lecturer James Piret, FCIC, of the University of British Columbia, and Tom Stanley, of General Electric Company in the United States. The conference also heard six CSChE Award lectures, numerous keynote speakers and a host of talks ranging from thermochemical conversion processes to carbon capture and storage and process safety. The student conference program was packed. Events included the Graduate Student Poster Competition, the popular three-minute poster competition, the Robert G. Auld and Reg Friesen competitions and career development workshops, topped off with a banquet at Calgary’s famous Heritage Park Historical Village.

Cenovus's Judy Fairburn says the oil industry is focusing on alleviating climate change.

Young delegates whooped it up at the 65th Canadian Chemical Engineering Conference student banquet, held at historical Heritage Park.


Society News

Things to know

The Canadian Society for Chemical Technology

(CSCT) Award nomination deadline is Dec. 1. The CSCT

Norman and Marion Bright Memorial Award recognizes in-

dividuals who have made an outstanding contribution to

chemical technology in Canada. Details at www.cheminst.

ca/awards/csct-awards.

The Canadian Society for Chemical Engineering

(CSChE) Awards nomination deadline is Dec. 1. The

honours include : Award for Best Graduate Student Pa-

per in The Canadian Journal of Chemical Engineering, the

Bantrel Award in Design and Industrial Practice, The Cana-

dian Journal of Chemical Engineering Lectureship Award;

the D.G. Fisher Award, the Hatch Innovation Award, for-

merly the Syncrude Canada Innovation Award; the Process

Safety Management Award and the R.S. Jane Memorial

Award. Visit www.cheminst.ca/awards/csche-awards for

more details.

The Canadian Journal of Chemical Engineering is thrilled to

announce a new award: The Canadian Journal of Chemi-

cal Engineering Lectureship Award, to be bestowed on

a Canadian citizen or landed immigrant who has made an

outstanding contribution to chemical engineering and dem-

onstrated exceptional promise while working in Canada.

Eligible candidates must have held their first professional

appointment as an independent researcher in academia,

government, or industry for 10 years or less at the time of

nomination. The nomination deadline for CSChE awards is

Dec.1. Details at www.cheminst.ca/awards/csche-awards.

The Chemical Education Fund (CEF) application deadline

is Dec. 15. CEF is a registered charity under the Chemical

Institute of Canada that promotes outreach and education

in the chemical sciences, chemical engineering and chemi-

cal technology sectors. Go to www.cheminst.ca/CEF

The 2016 IUPAC-Thales Nano Prize in Flow Chemistry

call for nominations deadline is Jan. 31, 2016. The prize of

USD $7,500 is to be awarded to an internationally recog-

nized scientist whose activities or published accounts have

made an outstanding contribution in the field of flow chem-

istry in academia or industry. Nominations can be submit-

ted to [email protected]. Go to www.iupac.org

for more details.

Queen’s University debuts First Annual Poster Day

The fall semester started off with a bang at Queen’s University. In the midst of orientation week, the Chemical Engineering Graduate Student Association (CEGSA), in conjunction with the Queen’s Department of Chemical Engineering and the Canadian Society for Chemical Engineering (CSChE), hosted the First Annual Queen’s Chemical Engineering Research Poster Day on Sept. 11. Presenters from undergraduates to postgraduates spoke on an array of research topics, ranging from controlled drug release for pancreatic cancer patients to in vitro models of the foreign body reaction and more. PhD student Sean George took home both the award for Best PhD Poster Presentation and a People’s Choice Award for Most Creative Poster for his work on block copoly-mers as stabilizers in emulsion polymerization. Poster awards were presented by James McLellan, department head of Queen’s Faculty of Applied Science and Chemical Engineering and past president of the CSChE and Amy Reckling, the Chemical Institute of Canada’s career development leader.

The excitement carried over to Sept. 18, when chemical engi-neers from the Royal Military College of Canada (RMC) joined chemists and chemical engineers from Queen’s to compete for glory at the CIC Science Trivia Night, hosted by Reckling and Sarah Creber, the director of student affairs at CSChE. Students and faculty from the two universities put their science nerd skills to the test on topics such as movies, TV, music and history. Squad Chem from RMC reigned triumphant, winning first place and taking home some very swanky CIC mugs and sunglasses.

Presenter Sean George accepts his award for Best PhD Poster pre-sentation and People's Choice Award for Most Creative Poster from Queen’s University Faculty of Applied Science and Chemical Engi-neering department head James McLellan and Canadian Society for Chemical Engineering career development leader Amy Reckling.


Society News

Grapevinedan Bizzotto of the University of British Colum-bia has been selected as the winner of the 2015 Prix Jacques Tacussel from the International Society for Electrochemistry, in recognition of his contribution to the development of in situ electrochemical fluorescence microscopy and its application to molecular and biomolecular adsorption. The prize will be presented at the 2016 annual meeting in The Hague, Netherlands.

The Canadian Society for Chemical Engineer-ing Student Chapter Merit Award winners were announced. First Prize goes to Laurentian University Chemical Engineering Chapter. Hon-ourable mentions go to McMaster University Chapter Chemical Engineering Club and Uni-versity of Toronto CSChE Student Chapter. The merit awards recognize initiative and originality in student chapter programing.

The 2015 recipient of the CSChE Chemical Engi-neering Local Section Scholarship is Carol Choi of University of Toronto. The scholarship, spon-sored by the Edmonton CSChE, London CIC and Sarnia CIC Local Sections, is presented to under-graduate students in chemical engineering enter-ing their final year of studies who have shown leadership qualities and demonstrated contribu-tions to the CSChE such as participation in Stu-dent Chapters as well as academic performance.

The Public Service Award of Excellence 2015 recipients for the Scientific Contribution category are the National Research Council Canada’s Nano-tube Manufacturing Team, which includes Benoit Simard, FCIC, and Stéphane dénommée.

The Royal Society of Canada announced its 2015 list of new Fellows. They include: Levente diósady, FCIC, Jesse Zhu, FCIC, Barry Lever, FCIC, and Suzanne Fortier, FCIC.

Bob Masterson was selected to be the new presi-dent and CEO of the Chemistry Industry Association of Canada (CIAC). He replaces the retiring Richard Paton, who headed the CIAC for 19 years.

Aaron wheeler of the University of Toronto Department of Chemistry has been inducted into the College of New Scholars, Artists and Scientists of the Royal Society of Canada (RSC). Established last year, this division of RSC recog-nizes high achievement by scientists at an early stage of their career.

CIC heads west to boost chem student engagementThis past September marked a busy month for Chemical Institute of Canada (CIC) student activities. Following a poster competition and trivia night, career development leader Amy Reckling set off on a two-week tour in late September to meet with students enrolled in the chemical sciences and engineering in Western Canada, as well as with faculty members and CIC local sections. Students at the undergraduate and graduate level in Calgary, Edmonton, Victoria, Vancouver and Lethbridge were given an introduction to the association and advised on how to best use their memberships to further their careers.

Reckling also spoke on the value of networking through CIC events and involvement with CIC local sections. Students were provided with the opportunity to speak on what programs or benefits they would most like to see develop within the CIC in the coming years. Suggestions included: increasing CIC involvement at the local level through career networking events and inter-school poster competitions, developing the career resources available on the CIC website and making advocacy and lobbying initiatives more visible to members.

If you are student, recent graduate, faculty or industry member and have any suggestions for the development of CIC programming, or if you want to get involved with your local section and its networking opportunities, please contact [email protected].

CSChE and CGCEN announce the 2015 award winners

The Canadian Society for Chemical Engineering (CSChE) has announced its 2015 award winners. Official presentations took place at the 65th Canadian Chemical Engineering Conference in Calgary held this past October. Details about the winners’ research are available at www.cheminst.ca/awards/csche-awards.

CSChE winners:• Award for Best Graduate Student Paper published in The Canadian

Journal of Chemical Engineering: Ali Sarvi Rosen Canada Ltd.;• Bantrel Award in Design and Industrial Practice: Biao Huang, FCIC,

University of Alberta;• D. G. Fisher Award: Peter L. Douglas, University of Waterloo;• Hatch Innovation Award: Milica Radisic, University of Toronto; • Process Safety Management Award: David Guss, Nexen;• R. S. Jane Memorial Award: James M. Piret, FCIC, University

of British Columbia.

Canadian Green Chemistry and Engineering Network (CGCEN) winner:• Canadian Green Chemistry and Engineering Award (Individual):

Andrew Dicks, University of Toronto. Information on the CGCEN awards is available at www.cheminst.ca/awards/cgcen-awards.


Society News

Save the dateNovember 2–4, 2015

Industrial Chemistry and Engineering Conference

Toronto, Ont.

www.cic2015.ca

december 15–20, 2015

Pacifichem 2015

Honolulu, Hawaii

www.pacifichem.org

April 7, 2016

CIC/SCI Seminar and Awards Dinner

Toronto, Ont.

www.cheminst.ca/cicsci

May 8–11, 2016

24th Canadian Symposium on Catalysis

Ottawa, Ont.

www.catalysisdivision.ca

June 2–4, 2016

41st Annual Science Atlantic/CIC Chemistry Conference

Halifax, NS

June 5–9, 2016

99th Canadian Chemistry Conference and Exhibition

Halifax, NS

www.csc2016.ca

october 16–19, 2016

66th Canadian Chemical Engineering Conference

Quebec City, Que.

www.csche2016.ca

May 28 – June 1, 2017

100th Canadian Chemistry Conference and Exhibition

Toronto, Ont.

Is there an event that you think should appear in this section? Write to us at [email protected] and use the subject heading “Society News.”

In Memoriam The Chemical Institute of Canada wishes to extend its condolences to the families of Robert Crawford, FCIC, of Edmonton and Anthony Poë, FCIC, of Ottawa.

CSC accreditation bolsters students’chemistry undergraduate programs

An increasingly important role of the Canadian Society for Chemistry (CSC) is the accreditation of undergraduate chemistry degree programs. National accreditation is awarded by the CSC only to those programs that meet the rigorous high standards of education and laboratory practices expected of a chemist. CSC accreditation guar-antees that graduating students possess balanced and broad skill sets in both core chemical concepts and practical laboratory skills that are necessary to thrive profes-sionally and safely in today’s workforce.

Program accreditation involves a thoroughly structured peer review evaluation. The evaluation process applies only to the individual degree program. Accreditation committee members have a vast and intimate knowledge of both national and inter-national chemistry programs, allowing them to provide not only critical assessment and evaluation of an institute’s current programs but feedback to aid each department in enhancing and improving their programs. The accreditation process demands high standards of chemistry knowledge and skill but is flexible, allowing for creative degree programs following interdisciplinary trends in the chemistry community. Currently the CSC accredits about 140 programs at more than 40 universities across Canada and an additional 12 programs in six other countries. Upon graduation, students enrolled at CSC-accredited universities receive a certificate stating that they completed a nationally accredited chemistry program. This gives them a competitive edge, easing the mobility of students to proceed towards advanced degrees due to the comparability of the programs at the different universities. It also provides employers with a guaranteed level of competence of potential employees. CSC accreditation continues to promote and ensure that graduates of quality chemistry-based programs enter the profession and address the chemical challenges of our society.

Then and Now

Then and Now


Then and Now

Then and Now

The colour of our food is impor-tant not only from an aesthetic perspective but an evolutionary one. Psychologists have theo-

rized that human adaptation and survival are due in part to being attracted to foods that appear “good” while rejecting foods that appear “bad.” Such connections develop in concert with the experiences associated with eating certain foods. If the experience with a red food is positive, individuals will gravitate towards items of that colour. The opposite is true when a food makes a person sick. Bright reds, blues and greens are naturally the most attractive colours, while brown and olive green are the least preferred.

The allure of vibrant-looking food has been recognized for millennia — candy makers in ancient Egypt added natural extracts to colour their sweet confections. Natural dyes were also used to enhance spices imported into Europe during the 16th century. Three centuries later, during the

Industrial Revolution, as synthetic chem-istry was evolving, unethical traders began adding inorganic compounds to food to, for example, restore the creamy appearance of milk that they had watered down. Other compounds such as red lead (Pb3O4) and vermillion (HgS) were used to enhance cheese and confections. Poisonous chemi-cals like arsenic, lead and mercury were also used to make food more alluring. By the turn of the mid-19th century chemical colour additives had found their way into a host of consumer goods, from ketchup to mustard and wine.

As shown by this brightly hued adver-tisement from 1969, M&T Products of Canada Ltd. in Hamilton, Ont. provided chemicals to industry and the food sector to ensure that products retained the all-important intense colours needed to attract consumers. Applications for M&T organometallic chemicals for stabilizing and catalyzing were myriad. The company promoted anhydrous stannous chloride

(also known as Tin(II) chloride, or SnCl2) as a colour and flavour stabilizer for items like asparagus and frozen citrus fruits. Anhydrous stannous chloride (tradename Stannochlor) was also used by the pharma-ceutical industry and as a tanning agent, a reagent in analytical chemistry and as a catalyst in organic reactions. For polyvinyl chloride (PVC) plastic goods, M&T chem-icals made bottles appear crystal clear while providing flame retardant properties.

Inactive today, M&T was initially formed in 1962 in Florida and later headquartered in New Jersey. Regarded as a global leader in the manufacture of organic and inorganic chemicals, its products went by such trade names as BioMet, Durastrength, Metclad and Thermoguard. M&T Products of Canada was one of about a dozen subsidiaries world-wide. In 1977, the company was bought by Elf Aquitaine, a state-owned French oil firm that in 2000 merged with Total Fina to form TotalFinaElf. This company changed its name to Total in 2003.

1969Chemistry in Canada



Chemfusion

We share our body with up to a thousand varieties of bacteria. They live in our mouth, our skin and

mostly in our digestive tract. They total some 100 trillion — 10 times greater than the number of human cells in the body. We have known since the ground-breaking work of Louis Pasteur and Robert Koch in the 19th century that bacteria can cause disease. Koch’s elegant experiment demonstrating that bacteria cultured from a tuberculosis patient were capable of causing the disease in a mouse cemented the bacterial theory of disease and launched the quest for antibiotics. Nobody back then was concerned about disrupting the body’s natural bacterial flora with antibiotics; the primary goal was to treat bacterial diseases. Now we know that the bacteria in our body are an integral part of our internal activities.

Who could have guessed that whether a baby is delivered vaginally or via caesarean section can affect weight decades later? Yet this appears to be the case. A review

of 15 studies examining more than 160,000 births revealed that babies born by C-section were 26 percent more likely to be over-weight and 22 percent more likely to be obese as adults. The theory is that babies born by C-section pick up bacteria from the mother’s skin instead of her vaginal tract and that this bacterial population is more efficient at extracting calories from food. That notion is backed by the well-known increase in weight by farm animals treated with antibiotics. The drugs eliminate the bacteria

that are less efficient in breaking down food into absorbable components.

It is not only weight that may be affected by bacteria. Some researchers link Crohn’s disease, celiac disease and arthritis with a disturbance of bacterial population in the gut, possibly by antibiotics. The average North American child has three courses of antibi-otics in the first two years of life, which may cause a permanent shift in the body’s micro-bial environment. Exactly how bacteria affect health is not clear but the bacterial digestive processes produce a variety of metabolites that enter the bloodstream and may have an effect on the biochemistry that underlies everything from the control of blood sugar to the control of mood. Even autism may have a connection to the bacteria in our gut. This seems to be the case if we go by some mouse experiments.

It turns out that injecting pregnant mice with a virus causes immune activity that can lead to autism-like behaviour in their pups. The newborn obsessively self-groom and become disinterested in other mice. What causes this autistic-like behaviour in

By Joe Schwarcz

pho

to by Jessica

Deek

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the pups? It seems they suffer from “leaky gut syndrome,” a condition where molecules produced by gut bacteria can seep into the bloodstream and conceivably reach the brain. It is interesting to note that there is also an increased risk of autism in children born to women who had a severe infection, like the flu, while pregnant and that autistic children commonly suffer from gastrointestinal prob-lems, including leaky gut syndrome.

Now for the really interesting finding. Not only did the pups suffer from leaky gut syndrome but they had a different bacterial population in their gut than other mice. It seems that maternal infection can alter the microbiome in offspring. Furthermore, 4-ethyphenylsulphate, a chemical that can affect behaviour, was found in higher levels of the autistic mice, possibly generated by a bacterial species that were present in higher concentration than normal. This chemical is similar to para-Cresol CH3C6H4(OH), which has been detected in the urine of people with autism.

To try to rebalance the bacterial popu-lation, the researchers treated their animals with a strain of bacteria known as Bacteroides fragilis that had previously been shown to protect mice from gut inflamma-tion, hoping these bacteria would crowd out the culprits that were causing the leaky gut. That is what appears to have happened. The blood levels of 4-ethylphe-nylsulphate dropped and the mice stopped some of the autistic-like behaviours, including obsessively burying marbles in their cages. Certainly this study does not mean that autism in people can be treated with Bacteroides fragilis but it does introduce the possibility that treatment with benefi-cial bacteria — in other words, probiotics — may have a future role to play.

Joe Schwarcz is the director of McGill University ’s Office for Science and

Society. Read his blog at www.mcgill.ca/oss.

Autism linked to molecules from the human gut

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