Ten Nobels for the future

Mario J. Molina was born in Mexico City in 1943. After the degree in Chemical engineering obtained in 1965 from the Universidade Nacional Autonoma de Mexico (UNAM), he enrolled at the University of Freiburg (Germany) where in 1967 he received a PhD in Physical Chemistry. After spending nearly two years doing research in kinetics of polymerizations, he seeked admission to a graduate program in the United States. Meanwhile he returned to Mexico as an Assistant Professor at the UNAM and set up the first graduate programme in Chemical engineering. In 1968 he left for the University of California at Berkeley to pursue his graduate studies in Physical chemistry. In 1972 he completed his PhD and in the fall of 1973 went to Irvine to join the group of F. Sherwood Rowland, who had pioneered research on "hot atom" chemistry, investigating chemical properties of atoms with excess translational energy, produced by radioactive processes. Rowland offered him a list of research options: the one project that intrigued him the most consisted of finding out the environmental fate of certain very inert industrial chemicals, the chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs). CFCs, being used as propellants in spray cans, as refrigerants, as solvents, etc. had been accumulating in the atmosphere, and at that time were thought to have no significant effects on the environment.

Three months later, Rowland and Molina developed the "CFC-ozone depletion theory". Molina carried out a systematic search for processes that might destroy the CFCs in the lower atmosphere, but nothing appeared to affect them. They knew, however, that CFCs would eventually drift to sufficiently high altitudes to be destroyed by solar radiation, and realized that the chlorine atoms produced by their decomposition would catalytically destroy ozone.

They published their findings in Nature, in June 1974. The years following the publication were hectic, as the authors had decided to communicate the CFC-ozone issue not only to other scientists, but also to policy-makers and to the news media, since it was the only way to insure that society would take some measures to alleviate the problem.

In 1975, Mario J. Molina was appointed as a member of the faculty at the University of California, Irvine, where he set up an independent program to investigate chemical and spectroscopic properties of compounds of atmospheric importance. In 1982, he chose to go back to experimental research and joined the Molecular Physics and Chemistry Section at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Around 1985, he investigated the peculiar chemistry promoted by polar stratospheric clouds, some of which consist of ice crystals, and showed that chlorine-activation reactions take place very efficiently in the presence of ice under polar stratospheric conditions and provided a laboratory simulation of the chemical effects of clouds over the Antarctic.

In 1989 Mario J. Molina returned to academic life, moving to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he has continued with research on global atmospheric chemistry issues.

In 1995 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry, together with F. Sherwood Rowland and Paul Crutzen, "for their work in atmospheric chemistry, particularly concerning the formation and decomposition of ozone".

1997
Science, environment
and news media