Speed of Light

Video Transcript
Note: All WP Saskatchewan video transcripts are edited for flow and readability.

(Narrator) What would you say if we told you there’s something straight out of a sci-fi movie sitting in the heart of Saskatoon? A place where molecular science moves faster than the eyes can see. Where some of the world’s brightest brains bring their latest dreams. Whatever the first words out of your mouth were, we can almost guarantee that ‘synchrotron’ wasn’t one of them.

(Kathryn) “I’m Kathryn Janzen. I’m an associate scientist at the Canadian Macromolecular Crystallography Facility Beamlines here at the CLS (Canadian Light Source), and I also spend some of my time in our users office where we manage the whole research program and get people access to other beamlines.”

“We have the only synchrotron in Canada. We have a linear accelerator that speeds up electrons almost to the speed of light. They go through a booster ring to get really fast, and then we put them into a storage ring. They make loops around and around, and every time they make a corner, we end up with photons, which are little bits of light that come off in a certain direction and then we use those photons to do all kinds of amazing science here across a broad range of research applications.”

“We have people working on climate change, on food security, sustainable agriculture, new diseases, you name it. We can do really interesting science contributing to a lot of different fields here.”

(Narrator) Since 1947, when the University of Saskatchewan acquired a 25 MeV betatron, then again in 1961, with the announcement of a linear accelerator being built at the university, the prairies have long been a hotspot for molecular research and experimentation in Canada.

Then somehow, someway, on March 31st, 1999, over 50 years after its first foray into nuclear physics, against all odds, the small province of Saskatchewan outbid the University of Western Ontario to house one of the greatest technological structures and facilities our province has ever known: The synchrotron.

(Kathryn) “We broke ground in 1999 and we had our first users at the beamlines in 2005. So we’re coming up on 20 years of light. That’s 20 years of users coming with really interesting projects, bringing their research and 20 years of the Canadian Light Source helping take their research to the next level. I think we won the synchrotron in Saskatchewan because we already had a linear accelerator here. It’s been running since the sixties. It’s still in place. Of course, we’ve upgraded components and we’re doing a big upgrade later this year as well. We still are connected to that original SAL building.”

“There are a lot of really great advantages to having it in Saskatchewan. For one, we’re able to reach a really broad geographic user community. So we have people from B.C., people from Ontario, from the Maritimes, and we are kind of central, which is helpful for reaching a really geographically diverse Canadian research community.”

“So photons, that’s the fundamental elementary particle, and in terms of the samples that we use here, they range in size drastically. So we have samples like on CNCF will have protein crystals that can be like five microns big. So that’s like five thousandths of a millimeter. On other beam lines, we’ll get soil samples where we actually get a sample of soil and pack it in tight and see what’s in there. If we go over to BMIT, the biomedical imaging beamline, they actually do research on live animals, so we’ll get pigs or rabbits –  always with appropriate ethical approvals – and can do really interesting research. At the CLS we focus more than any other synchrotron, and I think that’s fair to say, on agriculture. Right next door we have barns. They built our synchrotron with cattle doors with the idea that we could do research using large animals if we needed to and we’re able to really focus on some of the things that are really important to the Saskatchewan economy, specifically in terms of agriculture. The broad applications that can be offered by a synchrotron are really incredible and we’re very lucky to have this synchrotron in Canada, and specifically in Saskatchewan.”

(Narrator) Unlike other synchrotrons, the one in Saskatchewan offers a once-in-a-lifetime hands on learning experience for the inspired young minds of the future.

(Kathryn) “The CLS is the only synchrotron in the world that supports high school students in research. We have a beamline that’s called the IDEAS beamline and we reserve time for students. We have a program called Students on the Beamline, so a high school teacher will come and do a workshop with our education team and then they’ll work with their class for a whole year, collecting samples, developing a project, and then they’ll come to the synchrotron and do real science on a real beamline. It’s really great for us, as staff, to see the next generation of synchrotron users coming up, and even if they’re not synchrotron users, to see the next generation of innovators and scientists and to see that we’re supporting the future of research in Canada is really exciting.”

“The students on the beamline – they’re answering real questions that have real implications for society, and they’re coming up with these projects themselves. So these are projects that they care about and they’re actually contributing to the scientific knowledge of the world.”

(Narrator) Groundbreaking projects come into this building almost weekly, and as amazing as the science is, the technology to house it all is world class.

(Kathryn) “We have a peer review process for academic access where we send out all of those proposals to external reviewers and get their feedback on what kind of scientific merit those projects have. And we give as many of them as possible beam time to come and work on their projects. We have researchers from across Canada and around the world who come to use our facilities. We have 22 different beamlines around the synchrotron, and each one of those does slightly different science.”

“The technology required to run a synchrotron is a lot and it’s always evolving. So we’re always looking for new ways to automate beamlines to make them more efficient, easier to use, and to do new and cool things. So every beamline has some kind of optics. So they might have mirrors or crystals that will condition the photons before they get to the sample.”

“Each beamline also has its own detector. So different detectors can detect different parts of the light spectrum, that range from really short wavelengths in the infrared zone of the light spectrum all the way up to hard X-rays with hundreds of kiloelectron volts.”

“It’s the same way that your eyes can detect visible light and your skin can detect UV light –  which we all know when we get a sunburn – each camera or detector on the beamline can detect a different kind of light. On some of the beamlines we have robots. So rather than users having to go in and mount each sample by hand, we can just load up a bunch of samples and the robot can actually load them all up, one by one.”

(Narrator) It isn’t just crystals in petrie dishes, photons whizzing around, and robots loading samples. Some of the advancements being made at the Canadian Light Source have larger than life implications.

(Kathryn) “Recently there was a group from the University of British Columbia that was looking at blood types. So they found two enzymes that would actually work to change blood from, for instance, from Type A to the universal donor, Type O. Obviously that has really huge implications, as we experience blood shortages more and more in the world, but what they’ve pivoted to, as it’s actually not that efficient to convert a unit of blood into Type O, they’re looking at organ donation. Right now if you want to donate a kidney, for instance, you have to make sure that donor kidney has the same blood type as the recipient, so they’re taking these two enzymes and putting it in the solution with the donor organ.”

“They’re hoping to move into human trials, where they can take an organ that starts out as Type A or a non-matching blood type and convert that organ into Type O, so it would become a universal donor and obviously this could really blow the roof off of organ donation in terms of expanding the potential donor pool.”

(Narrator) With tours available to anyone, the Canadian Light Source is doing its best to give the public eyes on some of the revolutionary science in Saskatchewan. So don’t blink, or you just might miss it.

(Kathryn) “We do public tours several times a week. You can sign up on our website for a tour at any time. It’s a really cool way to come and see for yourself, what the Canadian Light Source looks like and what it does. It’s hard to really get a feeling for the scale of it until you’re here in person. We love to see people come and check it out.”

“The synchrotron is the best kept secret in Saskatchewan and we try not to keep it a secret. When I tell people that I work at the Canadian Light Source, I often get a lot of questions about what that means, but what it means to me is that I’m able to support the research and the innovation in Canada that I know is critical to society for future generations. I just think that’s really important in our world, and I’m really happy to be a part of it.”

Credits:

MSc. Associate Scientist (Canadian Macromolecular Crystallography Facility Beamline) & User Experience Coordinator – Kathryn Janzen

Canadian Light Source Photography – www.flickr.com/photos/canlightsource

Filmed at the Canadian Light Source on campus at the University of Saskatchewan in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan.