[Scpg] Halloween Night Scary Lecture -Global Warming - Sherwood Rowland- Corwin Pavillion -Oct 31 7pm

[Wesley Roe and Marjorie Lakin Erickson]

Halloween Night Scary Lecture -Global Warming - Sherwood Rowland-  The 
Nobel Prize in Chemistry 1995 winner
  Oct 31 7pm
Corwin Pavillion

"Global Climate Change: Present and Future"

Admission is free -Please Park UCSB Library

Recent Natural disasters have re-focused public attention on the continuing 
short and long term consequences of global warming'.
Nobel Prize winning scientist will offer his insights into what the recent 
research has revealed about these developments and what they mean for the 
future of life on our planet


Rowland shared the 1995 Nobel Prize for Chemistry with chemists Mario 
Molina and Paul Crutzen. The researchers discovered that man-made 
chlorofluorocarbon (CFC) propellants accelerate the decomposition of the 
ozonosphere, which protects the Earth from ultraviolet radiation. Their 
findings eventually brought about international changes in the chemical 
industry. Rowland holds a doctorate in chemistry from the University of 
Chicago and has been a professor of chemistry at the University of 
California, Irvine since 1964.
.
Rowland was educated in his hometown at Ohio Wesleyan University (B.A., 
1948) and at the University of Chicago (M.S., 1951; Ph.D., 1952). He held 
academic posts at Princeton University (1952–56) and at the University of 
Kansas (1956–64) before becoming a professor of chemistry at the University 
of California, Irvine, in 1964. At Irvine in the early 1970s he began 
working with Molina. Rowland was elected to the National Academy of 
Sciences in 1978.

Rowland and Molina theorized that CFC gases combine with solar radiation 
and decompose in the stratosphere, releasing atoms of chlorine and chlorine 
monoxide that are individually able to destroy large numbers of ozone 
molecules. Their research, first published in Nature magazine in 1974, 
initiated a federal investigation of the problem. The National Academy of 
Sciences concurred with their findings in 1976, and in 1978 CFC-based 
aerosols were banned in the United States. Further validation of their work 
came in the mid-1980s with the discovery of the so-called hole in the ozone 
shield over Antarctica. In 1987 an international protocol to ban the 
production of ozone-depleting gases was negotiated by the United Nations in 
Montreal.



Sherwood Rowland – Autobiography- The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 1995 Winner

I was born on June 28, 1927, the second of three sons, in the small central 
Ohio town of Delaware, the home of Ohio Wesleyan University. My father and 
mother had moved there the previous year when he took the position of 
Professor of Mathematics and Chairman of the Department at Ohio Wesleyan. 
All of my elementary and high school education was received in the Delaware 
public schools from an excellent set of teachers. The Delaware school 
system then believed in accelerated promotion, so that I entered first 
grade at age 5 and skipped the fourth grade entirely, with the result that 
I entered high school at 12 and graduated a few weeks before my sixteenth 
birthday. The college preparatory curriculum was strong on Latin, English, 
History, Science and Mathematics. The academic side of high school was easy 
for me, and I enjoyed it. In several summers of my early teens, the high 
school science teacher entrusted to me during his two week vacations the 
operation of the local volunteer weather station, an auxiliary part of the 
U.S. weather service-maximum and minimum temperatures and total 
precipitation. This was my first exposure to systematic experimentation and 
data collection.

Our home was filled with books, and all of us were avid readers. My reading 
at that time ran toward naval history, which was complemented with 
realistic scale-models and simulated naval battles using an elaborate 
mathematical system for rating each warship and the effects of combat on 
them. During my sophomore year in high school, my math teacher, who also 
coached tennis and basketball, encouraged me to take up tennis - which led 
me onto the varsity tennis team for my junior and senior years, and into a 
full decade of intense athletic competition. As a senior, I played on the 
varsity basketball team.

After graduation from high school in 1943, almost all of my male classmates 
immediately entered the military services. However, because I was still 
well under the compulsory draft age of 18, I enrolled at Ohio Wesleyan and 
attended the university year-round for the next two years. During these war 
years, only 30 or 40 civilian males were on campus, plus about 200 naval 
officer trainees and 1,000 women. With so few men available, I played on 
the University basketball and baseball teams, and wrote much of the sports 
page for the University newspaper.

My accelerated academic schedule made me eligible for my final year of 
university in June, 1945, as I approached my 18th birthday. However, with 
the fighting in the Pacific and the continuing military draft, I enlisted 
in a Navy program to train radar operators. The Pacific war ended while I 
was still in basic training near Chicago, and I served the next year in 
several midwestern Naval Separation Centers, as the 10,000,000 Americans 
who had preceded me into the military were returned to civilian life. A 
major amount of this Navy time was devoted to competitive athletics for the 
Navy base teams, and I emerged after 14 months as a non commissioned 
officer with a rating of Specialist (Athletics) 3rd class. My first real 
opportunity to see the rest of the United States came when I was 
transferred to San Pedro, California for discharge from the Navy.

I then hitchhiked 2000 miles back to Ohio, traveling through Yosemite and 
Yellowstone Park on the way.

This year away from the academic life convinced me that at age 19, there 
was little reason for me to seek a quick finish to my undergraduate 
education. I therefore arranged my schedule to take two more years rather 
than one to graduate, and continued to play basketball on the university 
team. My coursework at Ohio Wesleyan emphasized science within a liberal 
arts curriculum, with more or less equal amounts of chemistry, physics and 
mathematics, and majors in all three fields. As had been the case in high 
school, I really enjoyed the academic side of university life.

I do not honestly remember when the decision that I would go to graduate 
school was made. My father had studied for his Ph.D., and all of us took it 
for granted that I would, too. Furthermore, both my parents had firm 
convictions that the University of Chicago, which each had attended, was 
not just the best choice for graduate work, but the only choice. So I 
applied to the Department of Chemistry at the University of Chicago for 
Fall 1948, and was duly admitted. All service veterans were entitled to a 
certain number of months (27 in my case) of paid university education, and 
I had not used any of these credits during my undergraduate years at Ohio 
Wesleyan because faculty children did not pay tuition, and I lived at home. 
I therefore didn't apply for any of the teaching assistantships or academic 
fellowships, and was quite surprised after arriving in Chicago to find that 
many of my fellow students were being paid by the University to attend 
graduate school. In subsequent years, I was supported by an Atomic Energy 
Commission (A.E.C.) national fellowship.

At that time, the Chemistry Department of the University of Chicago had a 
policy of immediately assigning each new graduate student to a temporary 
faculty adviser prior to the choice of an individual research topic. My 
randomly assigned mentor was Willard F. Libby, who had just finished 
developing the Carbon-14 Dating technique for which he received the 1960 
Nobel Prize. Bill Libby (although I never called him anything but 
"Professor Libby" until I was more than 40 years old) was a charismatic, 
brusque (on first meeting, "I see you made all A's in undergraduate school. 
We're here to find out if you are any damn good!") dynamo, with a very wide 
range of fertile ideas for scientific research. I settled automatically and 
happily into his research group, and became a radiochemist working on the 
chemistry of radioactive atoms. Almost everything I learned about how to be 
a research scientist came from listening to and observing Bill Libby.

The first nuclear reactor had been built by Enrico Fermi in 1942 under the 
football stands at the University of Chicago, and the post-war university 
had managed to capture many of the leading scientists from the Manhattan 
Project into the Physics and Chemistry departments. My impression at the 
time (and now in retrospect 45 years later) was that this was an 
unbelievably exciting time in the physical sciences at the University of 
Chicago. My physical chemistry course was taught by Harold Urey for two 
quarters and in the third quarter by Edward Teller; inorganic chemistry was 
given by Henry Taube; radiochemistry by Libby. I also attended courses on 
Nuclear Physics given by Maria Goeppert Mayer and by Fermi. (The chemistry 
student grapevine said, "Go to any lecture that Fermi gives on any 
subject"). Urey and Fermi already had been awarded Nobel Prizes, and Libby, 
Mayer and Taube were to receive theirs in the future.

My thesis concerned the chemical state of cyclotron-produced radioactive 
bromine atoms. The nuclear process not only creates a radioactive atom, but 
breaks it loose from all of its chemical bonds. These highly energetic 
atoms exist only in very, very low concentration, but can subsequently be 
traced by their eventual radioactive decay. Bill Libby gave his graduate 
students an unusual amount of leeway in how they chose to use their time, 
and was a superb research superviser - supporting, encouraging, but never 
letting one forget that intensive critical thought, together with 
unrelenting hard work on experiments, underlay all progress in our research.

My interest in competitive athletics also continued unabated in graduate 
school. Because of the atypical structure of its undergraduate college 
system, the University of Chicago, unlike almost all other American 
universities, permitted graduate students to compete in intercollegiate 
athletics. During my first graduate year, I played both basketball and 
baseball for the University teams. I continued to play baseball for the 
University during the spring for two more years, and spent both of those 
summers playing semi-professional baseball for a Canadian team in Oshawa, 
Ontario. Each winter I also played for several basketball teams around the 
city of Chicago.

Without a doubt, however, the major extracurricular event of those four 
years at the University of Chicago was meeting and then marrying on June 7, 
1952, Joan Lundberg, also a graduate of the University. We have now shared 
more than 43 years of married life - and shared is really the descriptive 
word. I finished my Ph. D. thesis in August of 1952, and we went off to 
Princeton University in September of that year for my new position of 
Instructor in the Chemistry Department. Our daughter Ingrid was born in 
Princeton in the summer of 1953, and our son Jeffrey in Huntington, Long 
Island, in the summer of 1955.

In each of the years from 1953-55, I spent the summer in the Chemistry 
Department of the Brookhaven National Laboratory. An early experiment there 
of putting a powdered mixture of the sugar glucose and lithium carbonate 
into the neutron flux of the Brookhaven nuclear reactor resulted in a 
one-step synthesis of radioactive tritium-labeled glucose, an article in 
Science, and a new sub-field of tritium "hot atom" chemistry. The A.E.C. 
also expressed considerable interest in this tracer chemistry, and offered 
support for continuation of the research.

In 1956, I moved to an Assistant Professorship at the University of Kansas, 
which had just completed a new chemistry building including special 
facilities for radiochemistry. Contract support from the A.E.C. was already 
approved, and in place when I arrived that summer. Several excellent 
graduate students interested in radiochemistry joined my research group 
that summer, and were shortly joined by others and by a series of 
postdoctoral research associates, including many from Europe and Japan. 
This research group was very productive for the next eight years, chiefly 
investigating the chemical reactions of energetic tritium atoms and I moved 
through the ranks to a full Professorship. Both Ingrid and Jeff grew up 
knowing the members of the group - meeting everyone at our regular home 
seminars, and from an early age occasionally visiting the laboratory. 
During these Kansas years, too, the everyday routine was that the entire 
family came home for lunch. Later on in California, Ingrid and Jeff each 
worked regularly (but unpaid) drafting slide and journal illustrations for 
the chemistry department, and thereby continuing to know the members of my 
research group.

The Irvine campus of the University of California was scheduled to open for 
students in September, 1965, and I went there in August, 1964, as Professor 
of Chemistry and the first Chairman of the Chemistry Department. The A.E.C. 
support turned out to be truly long-term, surviving this transfer, and then 
the transformations of the A.E.C. into the Energy Research and Development 
Administration and then into the Department of Energy. That basic contract 
finally terminated in 1994, by which time NASA was furnishing the major 
support for our continuing research.

"Hot atom" chemistry continued to play a major role in our research efforts 
at the University of California Irvine. However, I have deliberately 
followed a policy of trying to instill some freshness into our research 
efforts by every few years extending our work into some new, challenging 
aspect of chemistry - first, radioactive tracer photochemistry, using 
tritium and carbon-14; then chlorine and fluorine chemistry using the 
radioactive isotopes 38Cl and 18F

When I decided in 1970 to retire from the Chemistry department 
chairmanship, I once again sought some new avenue of chemistry for our 
investigation. Because the state of the environment had become a 
significant topic for discussion both by the general public and within our 
family, I traveled to Salzburg, Austria, for an International Atomic Energy 
Agency meeting on the environmental applications of radioactivity. 
Afterward on the train to Vienna, I shared a compartment with an A.E.C. 
program officer also coming from the IAEA meeting. He learned in our 
conversation that I was personally interested in atmospheric science 
because of my early association and admiration for the 14C work of Bill 
Libby, and further that my research had then been supported by the A.E.C. 
for the previous 14 years. I in turn learned that one of his A.E.C. 
responsibilities was the organization of a series of Chemistry-Meteorology 
Workshops, with the intention of encouraging more cross-fertilization 
between these two scientific fields.

In due course, I was invited to the second of these workshops in January, 
1972, in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, where I heard a presentation about 
recent measurements by the English scientist, Jim Lovelock, of the 
atmospheric concentrations of a trace species, the man-made 
chlorofluorocarbon CCl3F, on the cruise of the Shackleton to Antarctica. 
His shipboard observations showed its presence in both the northern and 
southern hemispheres, although in quite low concentration. One of the 
special advantages cited for this molecule was that it would be an 
excellent tracer for air mass movements because its chemical inertness 
would prevent its early removal from the atmosphere.

As a chemical kineticist and photochemist, I knew that such a molecule 
could not remain inert in the atmosphere forever, if only because solar 
photochemistry at high altitudes would break it down. However, many other 
possible chemical fates could be imagined, and I wondered whether any of 
these might occur. In early 1973, my regular yearly proposal was submitted 
to the A.E.C. and was duly approved and funded by them. In addition to the 
continuation of several radiochemistry experiments, I also included in the 
proposal a new direction - asking the question: what would eventually 
happen to the chlorofluorocarbon compounds in the atmosphere?

Later that year, Mario Molina, who had just completed his Ph. D. work as a 
laser chemist at the University of California Berkeley, joined my research 
group as a postdoctoral research associate. Offered his choice among 
several areas for our collaborative research, Mario chose the one furthest 
from his previous experience and from my own experience as well, and we 
began studying the atmospheric fate of the chlorofluorocarbon molecules.

Within three months, Mario and I realized that this was not just a 
scientific question, challenging and interesting to us, but a potentially 
grave environmental problem involving substantial depletion of the 
stratospheric ozone layer. A major part of both of our careers since has 
been spent on the continuing threads of this original problem.

Since 1973, the work of my research group has progressively involved more 
atmospheric chemistry and less radiochemistry until now our only important 
use of radioisotopes is directed toward problems associated with 
atmospheric chemistry. This research work has been conducted at the 
University of California Irvine by a strong, hard-working group of 
postdoctoral and graduate student research associates, together with some 
able technical specialists.

The chlorofluorocarbon-ozone problem became a highly visible public concern 
in late 1974, and brought with it many new scientific experiments, and also 
legislative hearings, extensive media coverage, and a much heavier travel 
schedule for me. This change came after both Ingrid and Jeff had moved away 
from home for their own university educations, leaving Joan free to 
accompany me in these travels. She has attended-and sat through with 
perceptive interest - countless scientific meetings since 1975. She quickly 
became quite conversant with the general scientific aspects of ozone 
depletion, and has been a knowledgeable and trusted confidante through all 
of the last two decades of ozone research. Ingrid and Jeff, too, have 
maintained close contact and support during those often controversial years.

In many ways, the understanding of atmospheric chemistry is still in an 
early stage. The necessary instrumental precision and sensitivity for 
dealing with chemical species in such low concentrations has only been 
progressively available over the last two decades, and of course the trace 
composition of the atmosphere is highly variable around the world. The 
research group has been heavily involved in a series of regional and global 
experiments, often since 1988 as participants in comprehensive 
aircraft-based atmospheric field research. Some of this research involves 
challenging and interesting scientific puzzles, and some can also be 
described as directed toward global environmental problems. As with the 
ozone depletion capability of the chlorofluorocarbons, one does not always 
know until well into the work whether it belongs to the second category as 
well as the first. We continue to find fascination in the chemistry of the 
atmosphere.

 From Les Prix Nobel. The Nobel Prizes 1995, Editor Tore Frängsmyr, [Nobel 
Foundation], Stockholm, 1996

This autobiography/biography was written at the time of the award and later 
published in the book series Les Prix Nobel/Nobel Lectures. The information 
is sometimes updated with an addendum submitted by the Laureate. To cite 
this document, always state the source as shown above.