Mario J. Molina biography & his top quotes

Mario Molina whose full name is Mario José Molina, born on March 19, 1943 in Mexico City, Mexico and died on October 7, 2020, Mexico City, Mexican. A born American chemist who was jointly awarded the 1995 Nobel Prize for Chemistry, along with chemists F. Sherwood Rowland and Paul Crutzen for a great research in the 1970s concerning the decomposition of the Ozonosphere, which protects Earth from dangerous Solar radiation. The discoveries of Molina and Rowland duo was that, some industrially manufactured gases deplete the Ozone layer led to an international movement in the late 20th century to limit the widespread use of Chlorofluorocarbon gases which is called CFC in short form.

Mario Molina studied chemical engineering from the National Autonomous University of Mexico (B.S., 1965) in Mexico City and received an advanced degree from the University of Freiburg during 1967 in West Germany. Before returning to his alma mater to become an associate professor for the period of 1967–68. He resumed his education in the United States at the University of California, Berkeley (Ph.D., 1972), where he worked for a year before joining Rowland at the University of California, Irvine. The pair conducted experiments on pollutants in the atmosphere, discovering that CFC gases rise into the stratosphere, where ultravioet radiation breaks them into their component elements of chlorine, fluorine and carbon. There, each chlorine atom is capable of destroying around 100,000 ozone molecules before becoming inactive.

Mario Molina was the principal author of the paper describing their theories, which was published in the scientific journal Nature in 1974. Their findings sparked a nationwide debate on the environmental effects of CFC gases and were validated in the mid-1980s when a region of stratospheric ozone depletion, known as the ozone hole, was discovered over Antarctica. Molina worked in the Jet Propulsion Laboratory from the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena from 1982 to 1989, when he became a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge. In 2004 he moved to the University of California, San Diego. Mario Molina was awarded the USA Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2013.

Mario J. Molina was not only a great chemist, researcher and several awards winner for his achievements but also a great speaker and motivator. Here are some famous quotes which is very inspiring and morale boosting for today youngsters.

1. Many Latino kids should become scientists because we need scientists all over the world from all different backgrounds. We have many tough problems, and we need everybody’s help to solve the problems.

2. The scientists I looked up to at the beginning were not Latino. They were famous scientists of many years ago, like Madame Curie. Later, I realized that there were also, but a very few, Latino scientists. There were good ones, but very few, because there wasn’t as much a tradition to be a scientist in our culture. But this is changing.

3. Laboratory experiments, field observations and atmospheric modeling calculations have now established that chemical reactions occurring on PSC particles play a central role in polar ozone depletion.

4. Climate change and ozone depletion are two global issues that are different but have many connections. In the ozone depletion case, we managed to work with decision makers effectively so that an international agreement called the Montreal Protocol was achieved that essentially solved the ozone depletion problem.

5. Beginning in 1986, a series of field experiments were designed to test the various hypotheses which had been put forth to explain the Antarctic ozone hole.

6. One action society needs to take is to use energy much more efficiently. Instead of incandescent light bulbs, you could switch to LEDs that consume a lot less electricity, for example.

7. In 1960, I enrolled in the chemical engineering program at UNAM, as this was then the closest way to become a physical chemist, taking math-oriented courses not available to chemistry majors.

8. Keeping with our family tradition of sending their children abroad for a couple of years, and aware of my interest in chemistry, I was sent to a boarding school in Switzerland when I was 11 years old, on the assumption that German was an important language for a prospective chemist to learn.

9. attended elementary school and high school in Mexico City. I was already fascinated by science before entering high school; I still remember my excitement when I first glanced at paramecia and amoebae through a rather primitive toy microscope.

10. In contrast to the troposphere, the stratosphere is extremely dry and practically cloudless – the concentration of water vapor is measured in parts per million and is, in fact, comparable to that of ozone.

11. One of the very rewarding aspects of my work has been the interaction with a superb group of colleagues and friends in the atmospheric sciences community.

12. The basic science is very well established; it is well understood that global warming is due to greenhouse gases. What is uncertain is projections about specifics in the next few decades, by how much will the climate change.

13. When I was in elementary school, I was very interested in science already. I must have been ten or eleven years old. I started experiments with chemistry sets at my home in Mexico. I was able to borrow a bathroom and convert it to a laboratory. My parents supported it. They were pleased. My friends just tolerated it. The first education to be a good chemist is to do well in high school science courses. Then, you go to college to really become a chemist. You want to take science and math. Those are the main things.