F. Sherwood Rowland

Frank Sherwood Rowland was an American chemist, born in 1927 in Delaware, Ohio, and died in 2012 in Newport Beach, California. In 1974, working with Mario Molina at the University of California, Irvine, he showed that chlorofluorocarbon gases released by human activity rise intact into the stratosphere, where sunlight breaks them apart to release chlorine atoms that destroy ozone molecules through a catalytic chain reaction. He shared the 1995 Nobel Prize in Chemistry with Molina and Paul Crutzen for this work, which prompted international regulation of ozone-depleting chemicals.