Canada Foundation for Innovation

Award-winning author Robert Sawyer dreamed of a career in science, but was discouraged by the state of Canadian research in the 1970s. So he decided to write science fiction instead. These days, he often sets his novels in Canada’s remarkable research labs, including the Canadian Light Source (where he was writer-in-residence) and SNOLAB (where part of his Hugo Award-winning novel Hominids is set). Speaking to a room full of researchers at a workshop for the country’s national research facilities in November 2018, he surveyed the state of Canadian science institutions from the time he was entering university in 1979 through to the world-class installations we have today. Prime Minister Sir Wilfrid Laurier said the 20th century would belong to Canada; Sawyer tells us why, as far as science is concerned and thanks to the CFI, he was off by a hundred years. Music credit: Soda Machine by Kabbalistic Village | @kabbalisticvillage (https://soundcloud.com/kabbalisticvillage)Music promoted by www.free-stock-music.com (https://exit.sc/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.free-stock-music.com)Attribution-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported (CC BY-ND 3.0)creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/3.0/ (https://exit.sc/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fcreativecommons.org%2Flicenses%2Fby-nd%2F3.0%2F)

Award-winning author Robert Sawyer dreamed of a career in science, but was discouraged by the state of Canadian research in the 1970s. So he decided to write science fiction instead. These days, he often sets his novels in Canada’s remarkable research labs, including the Canadian Light Source (where he was writer-in-residence) and SNOLAB (where part of his Hugo Award-winning novel Hominids is set). Speaking to a room full of researchers at a workshop for the country’s national research facilities in November 2018, he surveyed the state of Canadian science institutions from the time he was entering university in 1979 through to the world-class installations we have today. Prime Minister Sir Wilfrid Laurier said the 20th century would belong to Canada; Sawyer tells us why, as far as science is concerned and thanks to the CFI, he was off by a hundred years. Music credit: Soda Machine by Kabbalistic Village | @kabbalisticvillage (https://soundcloud.com/kabbalisticvillage)Music promoted by www.free-stock-music.com (https://exit.sc/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.free-stock-music.com)Attribution-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported (CC BY-ND 3.0)creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/3.0/ (https://exit.sc/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fcreativecommons.org%2Flicenses%2Fby-nd%2F3.0%2F)

This country’s extraordinary real-life research facilities provide a wondrous backdrop for Sawyer’s imagined futures, proving you don’t have to stray far from home to be inspired by leading-edge science Award-winning author Robert Sawyer dreamed of a career in science, but was discouraged by the state of Canadian research in the 1970s. So he decided to write science fiction instead. These days, he often sets his novels in Canada’s remarkable research labs, including the Canadian Light Source [https://www.lightsource.ca/] (where he was writer-in-residence) and SNOLAB [http://www.snolab.ca/] (where part of his Hugo Award-winning novel Hominids is set). Speaking to a room full of researchers at a workshop for the country’s national research facilities in November 2018, he surveyed the state of Canadian science institutions from the time he was entering university in 1979 through to the world-class installations we have today. Prime Minister Sir Wilfrid Laurier said the 20th century would belong to Canada; Sawyer tells us why, as far as science is concerned and thanks to the CFI, he was off by a hundred years. Music credit: Soda Machine by Kabbalistic Village | @kabbalisticvillage [https://soundcloud.com/kabbalisticvillage] Music promoted bywww.free-stock-music.com [https://exit.sc/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.free-stock-music.com] Attribution-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported (CC BY-ND 3.0) creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/3.0/ [https://exit.sc/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fcreativecommons.org%2Flicenses%2Fby-nd%2F3.0%2F] Transcript: [SAWYER] I started out to be a scientist in this country in the 1970s. I was graduating from high school in 1979, and I wanted to be a dinosaurian paleontologist. [NARRATOR] This is Robert J. Sawyer, award-winning Canadian science fiction writer. He has written more than twenty novels, and his books can be read in over two dozen languages. Here he speaks to a room of about 85 Canadian researchers at a workshop hosted by the Canada Foundation for Innovation in Ottawa in November 2018. [SAWYER] My father taught economics at the University of Toronto, and he said, “Whatever you want to do, do a little research. Find out what the job opportunities are before you invest.” Because if you’re gonna become a scientist, you’re talking ten years to get your PhD. You’re going to invest a lot of time. So I started looking around, and at that time, 1979, there were precisely three dinosaurian palaeontologists in Canada. There are only 24 full-timers in the entire world. And so what I thought was a crazy dream, which was being an internationally successful science fiction writer, based in Toronto, based in Canada, actually turned out to be more practicable as a career choice than choosing science in this country in the 1970s. [NARRATOR] After he wrote his first novel in 1988, Sawyer was still troubled about not having become a scientist. He quotes David Suzuki, who was also reflecting on the state of Canadian science at the time. [SAWYER] He had said this in ’87. So, again, just to give us some perspective here, this was 31 years ago — “I was soon to see the difference between Canada and the United States. My American peers, starting out as assistant professors like me, could expect their first grants in the 30- to 40 thousand dollar range. I was told that National Research Council of Canada grants start at about 25 hundred dollars.” So there’s no question that, at the time I was thinking of becoming a scientist, and indeed in the early days of science in this country, we were undervaluing it. We didn’t have a lot of people who were making full-time careers in science. We were underfunding our institutions. We were depreciative of the great intellectual base we were producing here in Canada. Times change though. And I've been privileged as a science fiction writer to watch those changes. In 2002, a novel of mine came out called Hominids, which is set in large part at what was then called the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory, and is now — because it has widened its mandate — SNOLAB. [NARRATOR] SNOLAB is a unique underground research facility in Sudbury, Ontario. Located in a nickel mine two kilometers underground, the lab specializes in neutrino and dark matter physics. In 2015, Canadian astrophysicist, Arthur McDonald, and his research partner won the Nobel Prize in Physics for their discovery that subatomic particles known as neutrinos have mass. [SAWYER] And I remember, very vividly, calling up Art McDonald, and I said, “You know, I want to write a novel set …” And he said, “Oh man, we had a mystery writer come here. We weren’t really happy with what they did, I don’t know.” And he said, “What do you want to do?” And I said, “Well, in the first chapter, I want to destroy the neutrino detector.” And he said, “You know how you can do that?”[SAWYER AND AUDIENCE LAUGH] And I actually used his scenario. So he immediately got engaged. And I loved the fact that, when I was writing this novel, I was able to … I was looking for a facility that was world-class, and unlike when I started writing in the late 80s, by the early 2000s, I could look around and have my pick of them to write and set novels at. But I started with the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory, as really, it’s a wonderful, amazing, facility. If you get the chance to go, go down. Have a look. I learned that SNOLAB, has the world’s deepest flushed toilets in the world. And I felt bad because you have to go down for four hours. That’s the only … so, I held it. I didn’t know. I should have used the toilet because then I would have been part of that record, right? I would have said, “Oh, wow! I used it.” It’s like going to the Louvre and not seeing the Mona Lisa, right? You’re missing out on the whole point of the trip, in some ways. [NARRATOR] Setting his novels in world-class research facilities is an idea Sawyer has returned to again and again in his fiction. By his twenty-third novel, Quantum Night, he found inspiration in the Canadian Light Source, Canada’s national synchrotron facility in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan. [SAWYER] It was such a natural to set it there. I’ll just read you a paragraph from the novel.[READING] “Kayla and I made it to the Canadian Light Source a little after 9 a.m. I was amused to note that its street address, on the University of Saskatchewan campus, was …” What is it?[AUDIENCE MEMBER RESPONDS, SAWYER REPEATS] 44 Innovation Boulevard! [CONTINUES READING] “I suspect the other occupants of that street were hard-pressed to match the sort of things Kayla described as she gave me a tour. “A synchrotron,” she said, as we walked along, “is an amazingly versatile tool; it’s the Swiss Army knife of particle accelerators. You can tune its output to do almost anything, adjusting energy range, wavelength, resolution, photon brightness, and beam size. The researchers here do work in fundamental physics, archaeology, geology, botany, new fuel sources, materials science — you name it.” It’s incredible how much world-class, first-rate science is going on here. And that purpose-built machines — in a way that the synchrotron was, in the way that SNOLAB was — expand their mandate as time goes on. Who would have thought, when they were building the synchrotron, that one of its key areas of research would be archaeology? So incredible, once you have the infrastructure in place, what can be accomplished. [NARRATOR] Sawyer has drawn on powerhouse science facilities for his novels both internationally — including CERN, a particle physics lab in Switzerland — and across Canada, like the paleontology department at the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto and the TRIUMF particle accelerator in Vancouver. He is committed to using his fiction to put a spotlight on Canadian science facilities. [SAWYER] I never want to look beyond Canada’s borders, unless I can’t fulfil my fictional need in Canada. For instance, I have a novel called Illegal Alien. Illegal Alien is a courtroom drama with an extraterrestrial defendant. The defendant is charged with murder. In the United States, that means the defendant can be facing the death penalty. In Canada, the defendant would be facing a stern talking-to. So I had to set it in the United States to have the dramatic stakes. But in every other circumstance, I look for the Canadian answer. And it has not failed me this century. [NARRATOR] Sawyer’s enthusiasm for Canadian science stems from his vantage point of aspiring-scientist-turned-writer. He has witnessed a transformation in research in this country over the decades. He talks about that in an interview after his presentation. [SAWYER] I think we’re at the best we’ve ever been, but that doesn’t mean we’re going to be the best we’ll ever be, in terms of Canadian science research. I think we’ve got real momentum moving forward, here. We had a Nobel Laureate in physics in 2018. We had a Nobel Laureate in physics three years prior to that. I suspect we’re going to see more and more Nobel medals coming to Canada in the sciences, and we’re also going to see more and more generations in Canadian science students staying here because there’s nowhere better to go. Because the best place in the world to do fundamental particle research is SNOLAB. The best place in the world to do all the variety of things that you can do with a synchrotron is the Canadian Light Source. The best place in the world to do Arctic research is aboard our icebreaker Amundsen. We have, not only now the best trained minds, but also the best facilities. And what we’re going to see come out of that is a recognition on the world stage. [NARRATOR] Sawyer’s optimistic view of where Canadian science is headed carries through to his approach to writing fiction. He sees science fiction as instrumental to influencing how we envision our future, and the role of research in shaping it. [SAWYER] I’m passionate about science fiction, not because, as is often erroneously thought, it predicts the future, because that’s not our job. Our job is to predict the multiplicity of possible futures, the smorgasbords of tomorrows, so that we can look and say, “Well that’s terrible! Everybody’s under surveillance all the time, there’s no privacy, there’s no freedom. We don’t want that!” You know, George Orwell reminded us of that. Or, if we start, “Okay, a lot of new technologies in reproduction, but if we just let men control them …” Well, Margaret Atwood gave us a science fiction novel about that — The Handmaid’s Tale, right? The problem with science fiction generally is those are the easy ones to write. The dystopian — “If this goes on, it’s going to go horribly wrong.” And I felt, what I’m passionate about, is finding the place on that smorgasbord of possibilities, where there hasn’t been a really appetizing one put out. I want to say if we do artificial intelligence right, we can have this world, where everybody is better off. If we do genomics and genetic research and the sharing of genetic information in a socialized medicine context, we can have better, longer, healthier lives for everybody. I think that when science fiction turns its speculative knack to positive futures, we can energize … it’s all well-and-good that I energize my readers. That’s incidental. I make my living doing that, but it’s incidental. What’s important is when those readers turn around and energize their representatives in government and say, “We want that! Give us that! Give us successful, safe A.I. Give us longer lifespans that are healthy. Give us a way to grow more crops than we ever grew before. Give us this future. Don’t give us the one where the robots take over. Don’t give us the one where we have no reproductive freedom. Don’t give us the one where we have no privacy. Choose those ones …” And I’m passionate about being the advocate for the positive futures that I know … Because we’ve had 150 years, now 151 years, of doing it in this country, of making positive futures come true. And we try to do it for everybody! And no other country on the globe has our track record of doing it. [NARRATOR] At the end of Sawyer’s presentation, he reminds the researchers in the room of their part in deciding the future of research in Canada. [SAWYER] My favorite science fiction writer, Arthur C. Clark, once said, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” I don’t actually think that’s true. I think if you get too far into magic, you’re violating known physical law. But the spirit of it. That the more advanced science becomes … And look at how advanced we are, here in the second decade of the 21st century. Imagine how advanced we’ll be by the fifth decade, or the ninth decade, of this century. The more advanced science becomes, the more miraculous it will seem to the general public. The things that we’re able to do. You guys are getting the funding. You guys have a great custodian agency that you’re responsible to in CFI. You also have a great responsibility to your fellow men and women, to make sure you make the right decisions, as we move ahead into a wonderful future in which I, even I, could have been a scientist, had I been born today.

Annie Castonguay, a researcher at Quebec’s Institut national de la recherche scientifique, works to mobilize metals to destroy cancer cells and drug-resistant bacteria when traditional antibiotics and cancer treatments fall short. Cancer treatments like chemotherapy aren’t perfect. The drugs meant to kill cancerous cells aren’t choosy, so they take out healthy cells too, which can mean serious side-effects for the patient. And if cancer cells develop a resistance, the therapies might not result in a complete remission. Engineering new molecules that incorporate the power of metals to destroy diseased cells could not only lead to more effective cancer treatments, but also better defences against another serious health threat — multidrug resistant bacteria. Return to the collection [https://www.innovation.ca/story/i-picture-my-research-canada] 00:00:05 - 00:05:02 This podcast is brought to you by the Canada Foundation for Innovation. My name is Annie Castonguay and I'm an Assistant Professor of chemistry at INRS institute Armand Frappier. Metals are at the heart of Dr. Annie Castoguay's research. Her programme involves both fundamental and applied research. She is interested in the design of new organic metallic complexes for their use as catalysts and as therapeutics such as anti cancer and antimicrobial agents. She and her collaborators at the INRS Institute Armand Frappier are engineering new molecules to overcome some of the problems with current cancer therapies. Unfortunately metal complexes often have a bad reputation as therapeutic agents. Very often people mistakenly believed that they are too toxic to be used in medicine. What they do not know though is that metal complexes are widely used in clinics every day. It is reported that approximately fifty percent of all cancer patients who undergo chemotherapy are at some point treated with a metal complex. So for example a compound known as cisplatin which contains a platinum metal atom which is widely used in the world for cancer therapy. The compound is injected to the patient intravenously undergo some transformations and reaches its main target believed to be DNA so then the cancer cells die and the patient survives.  Unfortunately there are many problems associated with chemotherapy. As we know firstly therapeutic agents become less and less effective due to the development of cancer cell resistance. Cancer cells learn how to recognize the drug and adapt to survive in its presence so moreover theraputic agents are not only toxic to cancer cells but are toxic to healthy tissues as well leading to numerous side effects. I wish i could say that researchers have now solved all these problems. But unfortunately this is not the case. The part of my research program which aims at developing novel anti-cancer drug candidates attempts to address those two problems. So my team develops compounds based on routeenium.  Some routeenium complexes are known to linked to DNA but also to act through other modes of action so previously reported routeenium complexes were found to be very promising as drug candidates and some of them even in third clinical trials during the last few years. For example, an ongoing research project in my lab involves the preparation of multitasking metal complexes which consistent in the synthesis of compounds based on routeenium to which are coordinated molecules that can themselves display an anti-cancer activity. So the creation of metallic compounds able to act through different mechanisms simultaneously could lead to the development of new efficient treatments that induce less cancer cell resistance. Another ongoing project in my research group is the design of metal complexes that can display a higher selectivity towards cancer cells so to reached his goal we create thermal sensitive linkages between metal complexes and targeting molecules which can be disassembled at higher temperatures so those targeting agents with the special affinity with cell receptors or orginels of certain cancer cells are carefully chosen so that they can act as shuttles and helped the metal complexes to reach cancer cells or tumors more efficiently before being released either slowly at body temperature, thirty seven degrees or more rapidly with the use of a laser. So we hope this strategy to be beneficial for cancer patients by reducing the occurrence of side effects during their treatment. Dr. Thomas Sanderson is a professor of toxicology and he works with Dr. Castonguay at the Institute Armand Frappier. They hope the complex's they're testing will also work at starving ER positive breast cancer cells of the estrogen that they need to grow. And the other action of the same molecule would be to enter the micro environments of the tumor and enter the cells around the tumor that are actually producing the estrogens that feed the tumour and the enzyme involved there is called aromatase and the organic metal compounds that is producing have several aromatase molecules attached to it which are then released in these cells at least, that is the hypothesis and we'll be able to inhibit the enzyme that feeds the tumour 00:05:02 - 00:10:28 So if one of the components the mental part that is killing the tumor cells directly and the second components, the aromatase inhibitor. that prevents the food source of the tumor by inhibiting the enzyme in the in the surrounding tumor cells. This type of research is a painstaking process. Dr Castonguay explains that she and her colleagues are closer to the start than the finish in terms of developing a viable chemotherapy alternative. We didn't reach to the point where we would test even our best drug candidates in mice. What we do for now is that we do in vitro studies and we also started to work with zebra fish models. So these are kind of accepted in vivo studies. Preliminary toxicity studies for drug design. Dr. Castonguay's work at the Institute Armand Frappier flows from a lifelong fascination with the scientific world. Her quest to understand the world around her began as a child long before she started building molecules. I come from Grandby which is a city located in between Montreal and Sherbrooke in Quebec. And i've always been interested in science. I remember finding myself in the basement of my parents house trying to challenge myself to work on a specific topic and try to learn as much as i could on the topic. Just by reading some of these Encyclopaedia that were available to me in that basement. I remember that I was interested in astronomy. Biology also in chemistry but not specifically in chemistry.  I decided to go to Champlain regional college and i registered to a very broad scientific program. After that i started university and i went again to a general program because i chose to go in chemical engineering and so i i registered at the Ecole Polytechnic de Montreal and during that year and a half I really missed chemistry. I really understood that chemistry was missing. I really wanted to learn more about interactions between molecules so i decided to move on and registered to a bachelor degree in chemistry. So i registered to invest in Montreal, the building right beside but i remember that what really really caught my attention and what was really the highlight of my bachelor I would say was to take this course in the second year about mineral chemistry inorganic chemistry. It was a lab. I remember that I was amazed by the chemistry of metals. So after i decided that i really wanted to do a master degree in chemistry of metals so i chose to work with the group of David Sagarian at the University de Montreal  and i also was directed at the time by Andre Beauchamps who is also very good inorganic chemists. So i worked with them I had an amazing time during my phd. I learned a lot of things. The main goal of my PhD was to prepare metallic complexes based on nickel which is a metal and i had to prepare...  designing some complexes that we're going to be active to be catalysts for organic reactions so after my PhD I went to Tufts university in Boston and the during the training I worked with Molybdenum complexes. Molybdenum is another metal. It was a very challenging. When I was using a glove box so I had to work under inert atmosphere so i had to get very skilled at working with such compounds. Dr Castonguay's research into organic metallic compounds is driving cutting edge collaborations with scientists from a range of disciplines within the INRS. She began seeking out connections as a postdoctoral fellow where she worked at the intersection of chemistry, biology and therapeutics. I undertook to other post docs and both of them were at Mcgill University. The first of them was when i started to get more experienced. I would say a with organic synthesis and i undertook a very challenging project at preparing dendrimers. So I worked at preparing dendrimers that would have antimicrobial properties. So this is when i started to enter the world of biology and then i started to work with the collaborator of the group from do pharmacology and therapeutics department from McGill for my third post doctoral project so i was for the first time exposed to cell culture I was working with students would grow cancer cells in cell culture labs so that was very interesting to me. 00:10:28 - 00:15:02 I really enjoy doing that. When the INRS was seeking a professor of chemistry at the Institute Armand Frappier Dr. Castonguay said she was intrigued by the opportunity to work alongside so many different types of scientists. Her cross discipline research was seen as an asset. My experience in biology during my post doctoral studies allowed me to become interesting for people who were working here. And i found that i could establish a lot of different collaborations in different areas because i was a chemist, I was able to prepare molecules... interested in metals but i saw I had experience with anti-microbials in anticancer compounds. So here there are many researchers working in those areas along with immunology, toxicology, environment, .... There are all sorts of of research here. So i discovered that this place here was the size of a university department but there were so many different expertises in so many different fields of research. Metals may also be an innovative weapon in the fight against multi resistant bacteria. Dr Castonguay is testing some of her molecules on bacterial pathogens. Yeah as we know there is currently in an urgent need to develop new antibiotics that are active against multi-resistant bacteria so organometallic complexes are according to me not studied deeply enough for that purpose and this is why my group establishes collaborations with microbiologists from INRS with the hope to discover molecules with novel modes of action. So it was previously reported that some metallic complexes can interact with DNA... some enzymes and disrupt bacterial membranes. Complexes prepared in my lab are then tested against various multi resistant bacteria and some of those compounds recently screened were found to be highly active and selective against important patterns. Dr Frederic Verier is a researcher in microbiology at the Institute Armand Frappier.  He's working with Dr. Castonguay to test compounds that may offer a much needed treatment for people infected with antibiotic resistant bacteria. So the research of professor Annie Castonguay is original in the sense that she synthesize organometallic molecule that are for the moment underexploited for the antibiotic properties. There are multiple evidence that this molecule could be the source of new antibiotics with ... properties. So with Annie we have already carry out several screen of different complex prepare in her laboratory to extract ... complex with bacteria... activity so we are now looking for the mode of action with the the hope that the mode of action we'd be original. And we also hope to discover molecules that act on several different targets simultaneously to avoid evolving resistance in the future. So in fact we have already identified a very promising molecule extracted from the screen which will soon be the subject of baton given it's high activity but also it's high selectively for some ample time pathogen specifically.... The professors INRS Institute Armand Frappier conduct their research in every corner of the scientific realm. But when Dr. Castonguay joined the team she identified a need for chemistry equipment that would make her work more efficient and she credits investments from the Canada Foundation for Innovation and the Quebec government for funding a suite of tools that are essential for the research she and her collaborators are doing. I'm very lucky. I got a lot of equipment and without that the equipment I would not have been able to make any of the research I'm doing right now. With what was what was available at the institute when i started because as you know there were not that many chemists here and that definitely not doing the same chemistry as I do. So as i mentioned earlier we have to prepare compounds under inert atmosphere. 00:15:02 - 00:17:02 So we have a trio of three really complimentary pieces of equipment. It's great now now that we are all fully equipped. It's very very nice. It's completely different than when i started four years ago. I mean there are many advantages for chemists to be here that's for sure but the downside is that if we need something that is chemistry related we cannot borrow it. We cannot use it from somebody else. We have to be self sufficient so this is where CFI was really really essential for me to be able to undertake my research program here because definitely yeah. I could not function if I could not have all that. We just want to emphasize on the fact that it's very very important for an early career researcher to be able to have to be allowed to apply for that equipment that CFI is providing because it is extremely important not only to be able to undertake the projects that these early researchers want to do but also to keep them at a competitive level with the other early researchers from other countries for example or other labs. The investments the CFI has made to further Dr. Castonguay's research help keep her on the leading edge of scientific study and in time, her innovations with organometallic complexes may offer new hope in the fight against cancer and drug resistant bacteria. Find more research stories like this at innovation dot ca slash stories and subscribe to the Canada Foundation for innovation through your favorite podcast app.

Cancer treatments like chemotherapy aren’t perfect. The drugs meant to kill cancerous cells aren’t choosy, so they take out healthy cells too, which can mean serious side-effects for the patient. And if cancer cells develop a resistance, the therapies might not result in a complete remission. Engineering new molecules that incorporate the power of metals to destroy disease-causing cells could not only lead to more effective cancer treatments, but also better defences against another serious health threat — multidrug resistant bacteria.