A "green" chemist, James Guillet was fascinated by photosynthesis in plants and the wonders that nature could create with solar light and water. He wanted to mimic the function of natural systems in his laboratory.
As a scientist, he was a pioneer in establishing photochemistry and photophysics of the polymer system as an important and separate discipline in chemistry. As an inventor, he used his scientific discoveries in practical applications for human and environmental benefit. During his lifetime he registered more than 100 patents, including a process for making plastics (such as foam coffee cups and fast food clam-shell containers) decompose in sunlight, and an agricultural mulch film that smothers weeds during the growing season and then breaks down into the soil in the winter.
Although he was honoured as a scientist, he did not see his progressive ideas widely embraced by industry and government in this country. On the contrary, he was frustrated by self-interested environmentalists and paper manufacturers who lobbied against the industrial use of his "man-made plastics."
He was revered by colleagues and students, many of whom called him "the Boss" and came from around the world to work with him. "He was not the professor with blinders on his eyes who could only see science," says his Polish colleague Maria Nowakowska. He loved opera and theatre, growing orchids, swimming and sailing at the family cottage he designed and built nearly 50 years ago.
James Edwin Guillet was born into an academic Toronto family -- his father, Edwin, was a prominent historian and the author of Early Life in Upper Canada, among many other books. They lived in the Annex neighbourhood of the city before moving to the suburbs when Jim was 12. Summers were spent with their Ohio relatives at on Horseshoe Island in Stoney Lake near Peterborough.
Musician Sue Polanyi went there, too, as a child because her father was the Anglican Minister at the rectory on the island. "He was immensely handsome as a young man," remembers Ms. Polanyi, and he "grew up to have a grip on business like no other chemist" because he "wasn't a dreamer -- he was a practical man."
After attending Huron Street School, young Jim Guillet went to the University of Toronto Schools and then the University of Toronto. He joined the campus camera club, winning first prize in a photography contest judged by Yousuf Karsh, with a black and white picture called "Valley of the Shadows" that he had taken of the rocks in the creek at the bottom of his parents' East York home. Prof. Guillet always attributed his success in finding summer jobs at Eastman Kodak to his early passion for photography.
He graduated from the U of T with an honours degree in physics and chemistry in 1948. Unable to find a job in Canada, he began working fulltime as a research chemist for Eastman Kodak, first, in Rochester and, then, in Kingsport, Tennessee.
During the day, he worked on new types of graft and block copolymers but spent his evenings enjoying the company of Helen Bircher, a young university graduate from Nashville, Tenn., who had recently moved to Kingsport to work for the Girl Scouts. "It was a very small town and everybody knew everybody and we had a ball," she said, "dating and hiking and parties and church." They were married in 1953 in Nashville.
The next year, the Guillets went to St. John's College, Cambridge, in England. Rationing was still in effect, the best form of transport was a bicycle, and they found lodging in a thatched cottage. He studied under R.G.W. Norrish, a future Nobel laureate, earning his Ph.D in photochemistry in 1955. Twenty years later, the university honoured him with an Sc.D, a doctor of science.
After Cambridge, the Guillets went back to Kodak in Kingsport, where all four of their children were born. James worked as senior research chemist and later research associate in charge of polyolefin research before joining the chemistry department at the University of Toronto as an associate professor in 1963. At the time, he had 30 U.S. patents and had published 20 scientific papers.
John Polanyi, a future Nobel laureate in chemistry, was on the hiring committee. "He had a great string of patents to his name and we worried that he wasn't going to fit into academe," he remembered, noting the cultural disparities between industry and the "ivory towers."
Fears that Prof. Guillet's approach might be too commercial proved groundless. In 1969, he was promoted to full professor and named professor emeritus in 1991. "His bent was to do academic science and to figure out why things happened the way they did, rather than how useful they were," said Prof. Polanyi. "He warned all the time against letting the applications of science dominate the university agenda."
At the time, polymer chemistry wasn't a particularly sexy field. That changed largely because of Prof. Guillet's work. Hearkening back to his early interest in light and shadow in photography, Prof. Guillet's main areas of research involved studying the way polymers react to light. Polymers are large molecules made from smaller and simpler molecules. They can be artificial, such as plastics, or natural, such as proteins and DNA. Before his time, people were interested in how light reacts with small molecules and he advanced the science with large molecules.
This research led to one of his most important discoveries: how to produce polymers that will degrade or break down in sunlight. In other words, a potential antidote to much of the world's litter problems.
In true scientific fashion, the solution came to him while he was working with his students on the opposite problem: creating a polymer that is resistant to the sun's rays. Electrical wires, which are insulated with plastic, have to be replaced every so often because the sun rots the plastic, making it useless as an insulator.
In 1969, while Prof. Guillet was working on developing sun-hardy polymers, he went on vacation with his wife Helen to Andros Island in the Bahamas. Disturbed by the litter floating ashore from cruise ships, he realized he could "make it disappear," according to Mrs. Guillet. All he had to do was to create polymers that were less resistant to ultraviolet rays from the sun.
And of course he did. He registered three patents for photodegradable polymers in 1970, assigning the rights to the U of T. That same year, he started a high-tech company called EcoPlastics to manufacture ecolyte bio-cyclic plastics. The company, which also did contract research on tar sands and greenhouse films, was never able to raise the necessary capital in Canada. A Dutch deal collapsed after the OPEC oil crisis of the 1970s. About 50 per cent of EcoPlastics was acquired by a American entrepreneur in 1986.
Instead of a stock-market bonanza for the U of T, Prof. Guillet was awarded a Lindbergh Grant worth $10,000 in recognition of his efforts to create a better balance between technology and the environment. He and a colleague were also awarded a gold medal and Canada's patent number 1,000,000 for inventing photodegradable plastics. Some years later, a cynical Prof. Guillet observed, "It is perhaps a measure of the government's commitment to science and technology that the medal turned out to be gold plated!"
During his career, James Guillet published nearly 300 scientific papers and wrote 80 patent applications. He founded two other companies besides EcoPlastics. Medi-Pro Sciences Ltd., which was incorporated in 1976, did research on artificial skin and medical applications of plastics. Solarchem Corporation (1984) tried to develop pharmaceuticals and specialty chemicals for pollution control using sunlight as the primary energy source.
He was elected to the Royal Society of Canada and awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1981, a Killam Research Fellowship in 1987 and the International Award of the Society of Polymer Science in 1999. During his career, he supervised 28 Ph.D. theses, 26 masters degrees and 50 post-doctoral fellows and research associates.
He immersed himself in the lives and problems of his students and the scientists who came from around the world to work with him. "I thought he was a wonderful person who cared about his students and would spend hours and hours tutoring them if they were having a problem," says Susan Arbuckle, his secretary since she moved here from California in 1971.
That sentiment was echoed by John Fraser, Master of Massey College at the U of T, who called on Prof. Guillet a number of times to mentor troubled science students. "He was just incredible," said Mr. Fraser. "He knew what their log jam was and who they should speak to." He also gave the college two Paul Kane portraits that had belonged to his father.
One of his research associates was Maria Nowakowska, now vice-rector for research and international relations at Jagiellonian University in Krakow, Poland. Back in the early 1970s, Prof. Nowakowska, then a Ph.D student, went to an international conference in Prague, one of the few places she could visit before the fall of communism. Prof. Guillet, who was the keynote speaker, spoke with her after her presentation because he "always had the idea to approach young people who needed his hand and his help," Prof. Nowakowska said by telephone from her home this week.
He invited her to work in his lab, a trip she couldn't make for 15 years because of work and family commitments and the hurdles erected by the state to keep her from defecting to the West. She says his lab, then, was the best in the world in photophysics and photochemistry and "supervisors were fighting" to find places for their students "to work with Jim Guillet."
She arrived with no luggage, no place to stay, no computer, and almost no cash, so Prof. Guillet took her home where she was treated as a member of the family and given a bed until she found a place to live. It was the beginning of an international collaboration that continued until his death. Working with him was like being in "a volcano of ideas," she said. "People respected him and each other."
She met with him for the last time before Prof. Guillet underwent heart surgery in August. Even in hospital he was still encouraging her to pursue new patents on natural polymers and publish the results.
James Edwin Guillet was born
in Toronto on Jan. 14, 1927.
He died Sept. 23, 2005, from
complications following
successful bypass surgery.
He is survived by his wife, two
siblings, four children and
nine grandchildren.
Sandra Martin