Scientist took on the CFC industry and won
Frank Sherwood Rowland, Nobel Prize-winning scientist: born Delaware, Ohio, June 28, 1927; m Joan Lundberg, 1s, 1d; d Newport Beach, California, March 10, 2012, aged 84.
SHERWOOD Rowland shared the 1995 Nobel Prize for chemistry, with Mario Molina and Paul Crutzen, for research suggesting chlorofluorocarbons (CFCS) – chemicals once commonly used in aerosol sprays, solvents, refrigerants and packaging materials – were eating a hole in the ozone layer.
Dr Rowland’s interest in atmospheric chemistry was sparked by research by British scientist James Lovelock, showing the amount of CFCS in the atmosphere was about equal to the quantity produced by the chemical industry.
In 1973, Dr Rowland and Dr Molina, a young member of his research team at the University of California at Irvine, decided to work out what became of the invisible, apparently harmless chemicals when released into the atmosphere. They worked out that while CFCS are stable at low altitudes, once they reached the middle of the stratosphere, 30 to 40 kilometres above the Earth, the molecules would be broken down by sunlight, releasing highly reactive chlorine atoms.
The result, they predicted, would be a rapid and extremely complex chain reaction in which single chlorine atoms would combine with ozone, form chlorine oxide and then break apart to combine with ozone again – each atom destroying as many as 100,000 ozone molecules.
Dr Rowland was so horrified that, when he arrived home from the laboratory one evening and was asked about the work by his wife, he answered that it looked like ‘‘the end of the world’’.
In a paper published in Nature in June 1974, Dr Rowland and Dr Molina calculated that the emission of CFCS could result in a 7 per cent to 13 per cent loss in global ozone by the middle of the 21st century.
Dr Rowland took an unusually public stance, warning that ozone depletion could lead to massively increased rates of skin cancer and catastrophic climatic change, and calling for CFCS to be banned. His testimony led the United States government in 1976 to ban CFCS from use in aerosol cans; but interest waned, and within a few years CFC use was higher than ever.
Meanwhile, Dr Rowland found himself targeted by a US$28billion-a-year industry which spared no effort to rubbish his hypothesis. In 1977, the president of one aerosol manufacturing firm suggested the campaign against CFCS had been ‘‘orchestrated by the Ministry of Disinformation of the KGB’’. At press conferences, Dr Rowland found himself peppered with hostile questions by industry representatives. For years, he received no invitations to speak at chemical industry meetings. There were suggestions he was, as one of his colleagues put it, ‘‘some kind of a nut.’’
But Dr Rowland’s campaign was vindicated in 1985, when British scientist James Farmer and colleagues observed a massive springtime loss of ozone over Antarctica, and a smaller loss in the temperate zones of the northern hemisphere. Both depletions were found to be caused mainly by industrial CFCS. Two years later saw the signing of the UN Montreal Protocol, as a result of which CFCS are now banned worldwide.
Frank Sherwood Rowland was born on June 28, 1927, in Delaware, the son of a mathematics professor at Ohio Wesleyan University. He entered the university himself to study chemistry, and briefly toyed with the idea of a career in professional sports (at 1.98 metres tall, he was a college baseball and basketball star).
After two years at university he enlisted in the United States Navy, resuming his studies in chemistry at the University of Chicago in 1948. He stayed on to take a PHD in radiochemistry under the tutelage of Willard Libby, the Nobel Prizewinning scientist who discovered carbon-14 dating. He then took a job at Princeton University and later joined the faculty at the University of Kansas. When the UC Irvine campus opened in 1965, he became founder chairman of its chemistry department.
Although he became known for taking on industry over CFCS, Dr Rowland’s first involvement in an environmental issue landed him on the side of commerce. In 1971, he investigated claims that tuna and other fish contained abnormally high levels of mercury. By checking preserved fish specimens in museums, he showed mercury levels were no higher than they had been in the past.
The vindication of Dr Rowland’s predictions about CFCS brought him back into the scientific mainstream. He was president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, a member of the National Academy of Sciences and was a respected voice on the dangers of global warming and climate change.