Sherwood Rowland – a ‘Nobel’ man
It’s a hazy Thursday afternoon. I’m sitting in my car at the Physical Sciences parking lot, impatiently waiting for my husband. The campus is empty and quiet. At the bus stop, an undergrad listens to his iPod.
From my window, I see another soul approaching but it is not my husband. This one, I can tell by the look, is also a scientist, but a much more seasoned one. He carries an old leather briefcase and wears square glasses and a brown cardigan over a plaid shirt. He walks slowly, but with the confidence of someone who has walked that path from Rowland Hall to this parking lot a gazillion times. And he has. After all, it’s Dr. Rowland himself.
Frank Sherwood Rowland is a professor of chemistry and has been walking on the UCI grounds since before the university officially opened its doors to students in 1965. He arrived from the University of Kansas to assume the post of Chairman in UCI’s Chemistry Department and has developed research in various fields of chemistry, including “hot atom” chemistry, radioactive tracer photochemistry and atmospheric chemistry.
Most remarkably, it was Professor Rowland’s research on the fate of chlorofluorocarbon compounds in the atmosphere that led to the discovery of the depletion of the ozone layer in the stratosphere. For that work, he became co-recipient of the 1995 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, along with his former post-doc Mario Molina and another atmospheric chemist, Paul J. Crutzen.
Throughout most of the 1960’s and 70’s, chlorofluorocarbon compounds, also called CFCs, were widely used by industry as solvents, refrigerants, and in aerosol products.
After watching a talk by English chemist James Lovelock about the presence of CFCs in both the northern and southern hemispheres, Dr. Rowland started to question the stability of such molecules at high altitudes. In collaboration with Mario Molina, Rowland scrutinized the chemical processes and environmental effects of the emission of CFCs into the atmosphere in his lab.
CFCs and some other man-made compounds such as bromofluorocarbons, are highly stable and when released into the atmosphere, rise into the stratosphere without any major changes to their structure. Once in the stratosphere, ultra-violet light breaks down these compounds liberating chlorine and bromine radicals. These radicals trigger chain reactions that destroy the structure of ozone molecules.
This is a problem because ozone molecules would normally absorb ultraviolet light from the sun, and without them, the surface of the Earth is left unprotected from the negative effects of these light wavelengths. The increase in the amount of ultraviolet light that reaches the surface of the planet affects photosynthetic processes in plants and phytoplankton and, as we now know well, increases the risk of skin cancer and cataracts for humans and other animals.
Rowland and Molina published their findings in Nature in June of 1974. Their results were fiercely contested. Powerful industries such as DuPont fought the CFC- ozone layer depletion theory, regarding it as “science fiction” and “utter nonsense”. The inventor of the aerosol spray-can-valve and president of Precision Valve Corporation, Robert Abplanalp, allegedly wrote to the Chancellor of UC Irvine to complain about Rowland’s public statements. But that did not stop Rowland from discussing what he considered to be, as he wrote in his autobiography, “a potentially grave environmental problem”.
Dr. Rowland and Molina testified before the US House of Representatives in December 1974, and as a result, significant funding and research efforts were assigned to clarify the matter. Various publications corroborated Rowland and Molina’s findings, the most relevant being the US National Academy of Sciences released in 1976.
By 1978, the US had banned the use of CFCs in aerosols but continued allowing other applications until 1985. In that year, the United Nations negotiated the terms of the Vienna Convention for the Protection of the Ozone Layer, and after much debate, more than 25 countries, including the US, Japan, and several European nations signed the Montreal Protocol of 1987. This was the one international legal instrument that actually established legally binding reduction goals for the use of CFCs and other ozone-depleting chemicals.
The Vienna Convention and the Montreal Protocol have been very successful in addressing the ozone layer depletion problem by setting emission limits and timetables for compliance. In fact, much of its successful formula has been copied in the Kyoto Protocol to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change. Twenty-five years after the first international agreement to deal with the problem was signed, atmospheric concentrations of most ozone-depleting compounds have been drastically reduced and the thinning of the ozone layer seems to be stabilized. Yes, we still have to apply sunscreen to protect ourselves from ultraviolet rays, but overall, the problem is under control.
Meanwhile, another major environmental problem caused by atmospheric pollution has failed to make much progress in international negotiations. Of course, I am talking about climate change. While climate change poses a much more pressing set of consequences and complex remediation measures than ozone depletion did, it is useful to draw a parallel between the two problems and evaluate the lessons learned from the fight against CFCs.
Both are global environmental problems caused by industrialization, and thus require not only scientific consensus, but also a candid debate about the associated economic pressures that represent major impediments to the establishment of effective policies and international regulations.
Most importantly, we have learned from battling ozone depletion that the active involvement of committed scientists, such as Professor Rowland, is a crucial component in global environmental solutions. We need scientists to step out of their laboratories and develop a new relationship with the outside world. Professor Rowland knows that. In his address of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 1993 (published in Science, vol. 260, pages 1571-5) he said “we (scientists) are also finding, usually with dismay, that the society which surrounds us and which has supported us quite generously in the past seems less than fully appreciative of what we see as our tremendous success.”
Donald Blake and Sherry Rowland, in their lab at UCI
Professor Rowland is now 82 years old. He continues to contribute to the world with his expertise in atmospheric chemistry and global climate change. He has served as chairman for the Board of Atmospheric Science on Climate (BASC) of the National Research Council (NRC) in the U.S. National Academy of Sciences and currently shares his laboratory at UCI with his former student, Professor Donald Blake. In recent years, they have ventured in yet another new field of research: high-precision, non-invasive analysis of exhaled human breath to study diseases such as cystic fibrosis, diabetes, and pneumonia.
As my eyes follow this brilliant man into his car, I hear my husband running towards me and eventually jumping onto my car’s passenger sit. “Do you see him? That’s Sherry Rowland, you know? Ozone layer-Rowland. Sorry I took so long” he says. “No problem”, I reply.
With all this noise and commotion, the kid at the bus stop raises his head, looks around for a second, and then goes back to his iPod, innocent and oblivious of what’s happening around him. I hope he’s at least wearing some sunscreen.
UPDATE 5/2010:
The Nature website is running a special on the 25th anniversary of the discovery of the ozone hole. They’ve highlighted several key journal articles, including the Molina and Rowland contribution.
3 Responses to “Sherwood Rowland – a ‘Nobel’ man”
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The blog 'EARTHactually' was started by a group of young scientists, teachers and activists who study the state of our planet and ways to live in harmony with it. Our mission is to create a lively forum for the discussion of all things Earth related without censoring, editing or peer-review.
I love this article!!!—–Sometimes the really important people of the world just want to go about their daily routine without alot of fuss and attention—–many times our society makes a bigger deal about someone we really don’t need to know about. Thank you for bringing this special person to everyone’s attention!
A true visionary!
I think it is comical you are adulating this man. Have you actually read his 1974 paper? If you did, you would know it contains no original results, just speculation based on other people’s research. There is nothing “scientific” about this paper. There is no attempt at even suggesting, much less attempting, controlled, experimental validation of its “conclusions”.
If you actually performed the reactions this paper speculates on in the lab (something any real chemist would have done), you would find out that Rowland’s ideas about the supposed reaction rates are completely wrong. For anyone that actually knows anything about high-vacuum chemistry this paper is a joke.
Even in the fantasy world that his postulated reactions would take place the net affect would only be to make the ozone layer wider, not eliminate or reduce it, so his alarmist conclusions are absurd even if you accepted his ill-informed premises.
But, of course, he did get millions in grants and a nobel prize so he must be a hero.