Mario Molina was born on March 19, 1943 in Mexico City
Google celebrated the 80th birthday of Dr. Mario Molina, a legendary Mexican chemist with a colorful scribble, on Sunday. A co-recipient of the 1995 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, Mr. Molina is credited with successfully convincing governments to come together to save the planet’s ozone layer. He was one of the researchers who uncovered how chemicals deplete the Earth’s ozone shield, which is essential for protecting humans, plants and wildlife from harmful ultraviolet light.
Mario Molina was born on March 19, 1943 in Mexico City. As a child, he was so passionate about science that he turned his bathroom into a makeshift laboratory. Nothing compares to the joy of watching tiny organisms glide across its toy microscope, Google noted.
“I was fascinated with science even before I went to high school. I still remember my excitement when I first looked at paramecia and amoebae through a rather primitive toy microscope,” Dr. Molina wrote in a biography on the Nobel site.
He then received a bachelor’s degree in chemical engineering from the National Autonomous University of Mexico and an advanced degree from the University of Freiburg in Germany. After completing his studies, he moved to the United States to conduct postdoctoral research at the University of California, Berkeley, and later at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
In the early 1970s, Dr. Molina began researching how synthetic chemicals affect the Earth’s atmosphere. He was one of the first to discover that chlorofluorocarbons break down the ozone and allow ultraviolet radiation to reach the earth’s surface.
He and his co-researchers published their findings in the journal Nature, which won them the 1995 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. The groundbreaking research became the basis of the Montreal Protocol, an international treaty that successfully banned the production of nearly 100 ozone-depleting chemicals.
In 2013, President Barack Obama also awarded Dr. Molina the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian honor in the US.
Dr. Molina died of a heart attack on October 7, 2020 at the age of 77. The Mario Molina Center, a leading research institute in Mexico, continues its work to create a more sustainable world.
