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"People look down on stuff like geography and meteorology, and not only because they're standing on one and being soaked by another. They don't look like quite like real science (1). But geography is only physics slowed down and with a few trees stuck on it, and meteorology is full of excitingly fashionable chaos and complexity.
(1)That is to say, the sort you can use to give something three extra legs and then blow it up."
Terry Pratchett, Feet of Clay.
Being on his third set of eyebrows, Elijah Marshall knows quite a bit about blowing things up. It would appear that Chemistry as a science marked him at a very early age.
And seeing as he's been doing it for almost ten years, it looks like he can't do much else, really.
What's 'Why' go to do with science?
When I was young I was always asking the question 'Why?' Things like, "Why aren't mountains in valleys, why do various things happen when you mix things together (sometimes with quite unpredictable results), why does water go here instead of there, and why is the sky was blue". After driving my parents mad, I was steered in the direction of books, these holding answers to some of the questions that I was asking!
My discovery of books was like that moment when you realise you've just pushed the button on the big machine without actually realising what the big machine does.
I became a voracious reader, devouring books by the wheelbarrow-load, wearing out several library cards and finding out the painful way that staying up to 2am reading a good sci-fi novel was not conducive to attending class at 8am that morning. I found that science books explained most, if not all, of the answers to the questions I was seeking.
What did you study at school?
I studied lots of science in Year 11 and 12, both at St Patrick's and Launceston Colleges. In fact I finished Year 12 with most of the sciences then offered under the TCE. While at St Patrick's College, I was also a Captain of Rowing. As most of the rowing people in the state know, the best course is at Lake Barrington. The road into Lake Barrington is very windy, doubling back on itself several times in a few kilometres. I used to get very, very motion sick, especially on this road. During one of these bouts, I was looking at the rocks beside the road, wondering what they were and how they got there. Geology at Launceston College began to be very interesting indeed.
What did you study at university?
After finishing Year 12, I went on to study a Bachelor of Science at the University of Tasmania, initially thinking that I'd finish up as a geologist, with chemistry as a small part of my degree. As these things tend to, however, it turned out that geology became the small part and chemistry was pushed to the fore. Honours in analytical chemistry/separation science then followed, where I discovered that my passion for machinery and building things actually had application in chemistry. Honours was great fun. At least, looking back it was great fun. Hindsight is a wonderful thing.
So, that leads this tale onto what I'm doing at the moment.
What are you doing at the moment?
I'm in the throes of a PhD, that three-year exercise that will let me put 'Dr' in front of my name. I'm working with a couple of people here in Hobart at the University and more people in Melbourne at Orica Water Technologies, developing a new way of making gold refining work better. At the moment, the major gold refining technology uses cyanide, a chemical that's quite toxic, especially to marine organisms. The gold refining process is quite simple. Cyanide is washed over a solution of pulped up gold bearing rock. The cyanide dissolves the gold, leaving behind the rest of the rock. The gold is the removed from the solution by various means.
My project will be using a different chemical, thiosulfate, to replace cyanide. This means that most of the other parts of the older technology won't work as well.
The main focus of my work is to develop a new polymer that will grab gold out of the pulped-up rock solution, whilst leaving the rest of the contents of the rock behind.
This isn't as easy as it sounds, as pulped-up rock is really abrasive and harsh. The method for getting thiosulfate to pull the gold out isn't as well understood as that for cyanide. And finally, the hardest part will be designing and synthesising that part of the resin that will actually do the work of pulling the gold out, hanging onto it and then letting it go again.
Why do you love science?
All in all, it's lots of fun. Lots of fun indeed. I love science because it answers questions about what's happening around me. And the best bit is, it creates even more questions. This could take a while. Current estimates are for the rest of my life.
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