F. Sherwood Roland, May 2008
F. Sherwood Rowland, Nobel laureate most famous for his groundbreaking atmospheric chemistry work in the mid-nineties on the formation and destruction of the earth's ozone layer, died at his Corona del Mar home earlier this week on March 10th at the age of 84 from complications with Parkinsons Disease.


Rowland and his two colleagues Paul J. Crutzen and Mario J. Molina won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1995 for their extensive work on the potential destruction of earths stratospheric ozone layer by anthropogenic sources, specifically chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs), which were commonly found in refrigerants and other man-made materials. Rowland and Molina's paper titled Stratospheric Sink for Chlorofluoromethanes: Chlorine Atom-Catalyzed Destruction of Ozone that was published in Nature in 1974, was instrumental in the banning of CFCs by the Montreal Protocol in 1996.


F. Sherwood Rowland will surely be missed and revered in the scientific community for his significant contributions.