Mario José Molina-Pasquel Henríquez was born in Mexico City, Mexico, on March 19th, 1943. At a young age, Mario showed an aptitude for chemistry, which his family nurtured. He received a BS (1965) in Chemical Engineering from the National Autonomous University of Mexico. He spent two years studying Polymer Kinetics at the University of Freiburg, and then obtained his PhD (1972) in Physical Chemistry from the University of California Berkeley. He studied the energy produced through chemical and photochemical reactions for his PhD. Mario’s main areas of interest centered around chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs), propellants found in spray cans and refrigeration units.
Mario continued his work on CFCs as a postdoc at the University of California Irvine, where he developed the chlorofluorocarbons-ozone depletion theory. This theory states that CFCs destroy the oxygen compound ozone, which could lead to the destruction of the ozone layer. This theory was published in Nature in 1974 before being proven in 1985. This work led to him receiving the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1995, becoming the first Mexican-born scientist to achieve this.
With his love of hands-on experiments, Mario held research and teaching positions at UC Irvine, CalTech, and MIT from 1974 to 2004 before setting down at the University of California, San Diego and the Scripps Institute of Oceanography. In addition to the Nobel Prize, he had numerous other accolades. He was elected to the United States National Academies of Science (1993), United States Institute of Medicine (1996), and the National College of Mexico (2003). He served on the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology under Barack Obama. He also was awarded a Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Obama in 2013. Mario died at the age of 77 in his birth place of Mexico City on October 7th, 2020.
Sources
- https://www.famousscientists.org/mario-molina/
- https://www.sciencehistory.org/education/scientific-biographies/mario-molina/
- https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/chemistry/1995/molina/biographical/
- https://web.archive.org/web/20181101234146/https://ucsdnews.ucsd.edu/archive/newsrel/science/mcmolina.asp
- https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2023954118
Featured Image Source: Mario Molina at the Nobel Laureate Global Symposium in Stockholm, 2011.
By http://science.in2pic.com, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=94914026
