This Day in History: 1943-03-19

Mario Molina born this day in 1943, is a Mexican-American chemist whose work on the impact of chloroflurocarbons on earth’s upper atmosphere was acknowledged with the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1995. Molina shared the prize with Paul J. Crutzen and F. Sherwood Rowland. The warnings from these scientists that CFCs were catalytically destroying earth’s protective ozone shield led directly to the 1987 Montreal Protocol, a highly successful international environmental treaty prohibiting most use of CFCs.