F. Sherwood Rowland, Nobel Prize winner, dies at 84

F. Sherwood Rowland, who shared the 1995 Nobel Prize in chemistry for helping to discover that a chemical used in hair spray, aerosol deodorants and kitchen refrigerators was slowly destroying Earth’s ozone layer, died March 10 at his home in Corona del Mar, Calif. He was 84.

He had complications from Parkinson’s disease, according to a statement from the University of California at Irvine, where Dr. Rowland had worked since 1964.

(Anonymous/AP) - A 1989 photo of F. Sherwood Rowland.

Announcing that Dr. Rowland, Mario Molina and Paul Crutzen had won the Nobel Prize in chemistry, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said that the researchers had “contributed to our salvation from a global environmental problem that could have catastrophic consequences.”

The award was centered around the seminal findings that Dr. Rowland and Molina had made during the mid 1970s concerning chlorofluorocarbons, or CFCs.

The compounds — nontoxic and nonflammable — were known for their considerable stability, which had made them ideal as propellants in household products. They were also used as refrigerants in air conditioners and refrigerators.

Dr. Rowland and Molina discovered that it was the CFCs’ stability, however, that also allowed them to waft — one spray at a time — high into the atmosphere near the ozone layer.

It was up there, much closer to the sun, that the seemingly inert chemical turned destructive, eating Earth’s delicate shield against ultraviolet radiation.

Exposed to the sun’s ultraviolet rays, CFCs would break down and release chlorine. In turn, one chlorine atom would wipe out about 100,000 ozones. (Ozones are air particles composed of three oxygen atoms; the breathable air on earth is composed of two.)

The researchers’ principal discovery was that the CFCs were thinning the ozone layer, without which plants and animals could not live on Earth’s surface. Moreover, the process would continue to get worse: CFCs were so hardy that they could linger in the air for 100 years.

Arriving home from his lab at the University of California at Irvine, Dr. Rowland told his wife: “The work is going very well, but it looks like the end of the world.”

Dr. Rowland and Molina published their findings in the British journal Nature in 1974. Their work did not immediately catch on in the scientific community.

“It was met with a lot of silence at first,” Ralph Cicerone, president of the National Academy of Sciences, said in an interview. “ It was so innovative and went way beyond what people were thinking about and working on.”

Aerosol company executives were quick to dismiss their research, fearing its implications on the multibillion-dollar industry’s bottom line. According to the Los Angeles Times, one manufacturer claimed that the criticism was “orchestrated by the Ministry of Disinformation of the KGB.”

By the late 1970s, a number of U.S. government agencies, including the Environmental Protection Agency, agreed to a ban on the use of CFCs in aerosols.

In 1985, British scientists announced that they had discovered a hole in the ozone layer above Antarctica. It was about the size of the contiguous United States. The revelation that a high concentration of chlorine was floating in the polar air largely validated Dr. Rowland and Molina’s theory that CFCs were the main culprit.