F. Sherwood Rowland

Frank Sherwood Rowland was born in Delaware, Ohio, on June 28, 1927, the son of a mathematics professor. He was academically accelerated to the point of entering Ohio Wesleyan University at sixteen, served briefly in the US Navy at the end of the Second World War, and took his doctorate at the University of Chicago in 1952 under the radiochemist Willard Libby, the inventor of carbon dating. He spent his career from 1964 at the University of California, Irvine, as the founding chair of its chemistry department, working on the chemistry of radioactive atoms.

In 1972 Rowland heard a talk about James Lovelock's measurements showing chlorofluorocarbons present in the atmosphere everywhere on Earth — presented as a curiosity, a demonstration of instrument sensitivity, since CFCs were famously inert and therefore harmless. Rowland asked the question nobody had: if nothing destroys them down here, where do they eventually go? He put it on the project list for his new postdoc, Mario Molina, in 1973.

Their answer, published in Nature in June 1974, was that CFCs survive to the stratosphere, where UV photolysis frees chlorine atoms that catalytically shred ozone. The industry response was a decade of dispute; Rowland was accused of alarmism, largely dropped from industrial consulting work, and asked by his own university's administration to explain himself. He kept publishing and testifying. When the British Antarctic Survey found the ozone hole in 1985, the mechanism was already on the record, and the Montreal Protocol followed in 1987.

Rowland shared the 1995 Nobel Prize in Chemistry with Molina and Paul Crutzen. He used the platform relentlessly, serving as president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and turning to climate change with the same argument he had made about ozone. In his 1997 AAAS address he asked the sentence that became his epitaph: 'What is the use of having developed a science well enough to make predictions if, in the end, all we're willing to do is stand around and wait for them to come true?' He died in Corona del Mar, California, on March 10, 2012.