Series 7 - Consulting and industrial innovation

0.97 m of textual records

Throughout his career, Professor Guillet acted as a consultant on research and technology to a number of companies and also appeared as an expert witness in court cases. At the same time, he founded and was actively involved with running three small Canadian high-technology companies: EcoPlastics Limited, Medipro Sciences Limited, and Solarchem Corporation. The series begins with a general file on consulting jobs, followed by files on companies to which he acted as a consultant,
then those he founded (which begin in midway through box 041); each section is arranged in alphabetical order. The files contain correspondence, memoranda, notes, research notes and reports.

Of the major companies for which Professor Guillet acted as a consultant, only IOPTEX Research Inc. is missing from this series. The most substantial files are on two companies, Albchem
Industries Ltd. and the Allied Chemical Company. Guillet’s research for the former was the development of technology related to the manufacture of hydrogen peroxide centring on a proprietary polymer for which he had submitted a patent application in the United States (see box 036). Several doctoral students, particularly David Gravett, assisted him in this project; his notebooks and the progress reports are with the files. With the Allied Chemical Company, Guillet was acting in his capacity as president of Ecoplastics and worked on two projects – the development of commercial photoresists for deep ultraviolet lithography and Allied tar sands flocculent program.
The earliest company for which Professor Guillet acted as a consultant was the Glidden Company of Canada, with which he was associated for twenty years. Other clients (the list is not exhaustive) included oil companies Esso/Imperial Oil/Exxon, British Petroleum, Mobil Oil, and Standard Oil; Amersham Pharmacia Biotech, a Swedish company interested in Guillet’s work on DNA sequencing; G-Nano LLC, which sought Guillet’s expertise in cross-linked nano-particle technology; the Institute for Chemical Science and Technology, seeking expertise in the tracing of chemical pollutants; Johnson & Johnson (surface coating of spectacle lenses); Pan-Tec Inc., a manufacturer of composite tiles; Pheromone Sciences Ltd. (mammalian pheromones); Primaxis Technology Ventures Inc., which was interested in the Polytrace technology that Guillet had developed; and Webb Ocular Prosthetics which specialized in artificial eyes. There is correspondence with Professor Guillet’s former employer, Tennessee Eastman Company, with which he maintained an association for many years after he joined the University of Toronto.

The files on the companies Professor Guillet founded underline the problems they faced in finding sufficient financial backing to develop their ideas and market their products. EcoPlastics Limited was eventually taken over by American Eco Corporation and ecolyte degradable plastics were sold worldwide by Ecolyte Atlantic Inc. of Baltimore, Maryland under licence from EcoPlastics. The files on this company contain correspondence, notes, minutes, press coverage, reports and documents relating to investments by the Ahed Investors Syndicate. By the time Medipro Sciences Limited was sold to Pharma Patch PLC in 1993, it had achieved some successes in developing the medical applications of plastic materials. Two projects are documented here: a contract to develop new delivery systems for contraceptive steroids for the World Health Organization, and the development of wound dressings for burn casualties. The single file on Solarchem contains correspondence, financial proposals and contracts about Professor Guillet’s inventions in solar chemistry.

The series ends with two other companies of which Professor Guillet was involved, Seabreeze Plastics, of which he was a director, and Syntheria Pharmaceuticals, that experimented with liquid dressings.

Further correspondence may be found in Series 1.