The following article was written for Boeing’s Environmental, Health and Safety’s (EHS) Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DE&I) newsletter in 2020. I was a member of the EHS organization’s DE&I council.
Mario Molina: Latin American Nobel Prize Winning Chemist
Born, raised, and educated in Mexico City, Dr. Mario Molina received the 1995 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for discovering the role that chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) play in ozone depletion. This was just one of many honors Dr. Molina has earned to acknowledge his ongoing work in atmospheric pollutants. It was in the early 1970s that Mario Molina, as a post post-doctoral researcher working in the laboratory of F. Sherwood Rowland at University of California, Irvine, studied the behavior of CFC compounds, which were commonly used in aerosol sprays, plastic foam, and refrigerants. By modeling what would happen with these compounds once released into the atmosphere, Molina theorized that CFCs would break down and initiate a chemical reaction destroying the ozone in the upper atmosphere. The thin layer of ozone in the Earth’s stratosphere absorbs and blocks much of the sun sun’s harmful ultraviolet radiation. The destruction of the ozone layer would be detrimental to plant and animal life on Earth. Molina and Rowland co-authored a 1974 paper highlighting the threat of CFCs to the ozone layer in the stratosphere that was published in the journal Nature.
While this work was not welcomed by industrial users of CFCs, Molina and Rowland, along with many others, continued exploring the behavior of CFCs and the status of the Earth Earth’s ozone layer. That the damaging effects of CFCs were an urgent concern became widely accepted by both the scientific community and the public, leading to the signing of the Montreal Protocol in 1987.
In the decades leading up to and following his 1995 Nobel Prize, Dr. Molina continued not only to research atmospheric pollution, but to advocate for practices and policies that lead to cleaner air in Mexico City and around the world. He has received numerous awards over the years recognizing his important contributions, including:
- Over 30 honorary degrees from institutions in Mexico, Canada, the US, and Europe
- 2013 Presidential Medal of Freedom from President Barack Obama
- An asteroid was named in his honor