SAN FRANCISCO — F. Sherwood Rowland, whose discovery in 1974 of the danger that aerosols posed to the ozone layer was initially met with disdain but who was ultimately vindicated with the 1995 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, died on Saturday at his home in Corona del Mar, Calif. He was 84.
The cause was complications of Parkinson’s disease, according to the University of California, Irvine, where he was the Donald Bren research professor of chemistry in earth system science.
Industry representatives at first disputed Dr. Rowland’s findings, and many skeptical colleagues in the field avoided him. But his findings, achieved in laboratory experiments, were supported 11 years later when British scientists discovered that the stratospheric ozone layer, which blocks harmful ultraviolet rays, had developed a hole over Antarctica.
The discovery led to the 1987 Montreal Protocol, a landmark international environmental treaty to stop the production of the aerosol compounds known as chlorofluorocarbons, or CFC’s, and other ozone-depleting chemicals and to eliminate inventories of them.
Along with a colleague, Mario Molina, Dr. Rowland found that chlorinated fluorocarbons, the supposedly inert building blocks of aerosol sprays that were then common in deodorants, hair care products and grocery freezers had the potential to deplete the ozone layer to dangerous levels.
In a paper published in the journal Nature in 1974, the two scientists showed that when CFC’s rise into the stratosphere, they are bombarded by powerful doses of ultraviolet rays. A single chlorine atom knocked free, they found, can absorb more than 100,000 ozone molecules. More disturbing, the atoms could linger in the stratosphere for up to a century.
“The clarity and startling nature of what Molina and Rowland came up with — the notion that something you could hold in your hand could affect the entire global environment, not just the room in which you were standing — was extraordinary,” Ralph Cicerone, the president of the National Academy of Sciences and a longtime colleague of Dr. Rowland, said in an interview.
“It really did spark research,” he added. “They started a whole new field. You can now see around the world scientific journals by the score, research programs in universities, universities hiring people to work on these problems.”
Drs. Rowland and Molina shared the Nobel Prize with Paul Crutzen of the Max Planck Institute in Germany for their work on ozone.
Dr. Rowland, a 6-foot-5 former college basketball player who bore some resemblance to the actor James Arness of “Gunsmoke” television fame, had a genial, even-tempered demeanor that helped him shrug off industry attacks, his colleagues said. One article, in the trade publication Aerosol Age, accused him and Dr. Molina of being K.G.B. agents out to destroy capitalism.
“Back in the late ’70s and early ’80s — I call it the cold war period for ozone depletion — there were a lot of potshots taken at Sherry,” said Dr. Donald Blake, a colleague of Dr. Rowland’s at Irvine, “and I don’t think his pulse went up by a beat.”
He added: “How could he remain so calm? Because he believed what he did was right.”
Even so, colleagues in chemistry departments gave Dr. Rowland a wide berth for about a decade, until the British findings on the ozone hole were published, both Dr. Blake and Dr. Cicerone said.
“He mentioned to me that he had not been invited to any chemistry department to give a lecture” from about 1975 to 1985, Dr. Blake recalled. Dr. Cicerone said, “You could probably name any top chemistry department in the country and say, ‘Did they invite Rowland to lecture in that period?’ And the answer would be no.”
Dr. Cicerone, whose own work established the possibility of a chlorine chain reaction, said “the situation 30, 35, even 40 years ago was so different.”
“The territory they stepped into and defined were so new that most scientists felt they didn’t know what was going on,” he said. “They didn’t feel prepared — or they felt the linkage with an ongoing human activity was too big a step.”
Dr. Rowland did not shy from embracing the consequences of his theory and pushing Congress to ban CFC’s. Dr. Molina said in an interview on Monday that he and Dr. Rowland “were not sure we were going to be successful” in pushing for a ban on CFC’s.
“But we started something that was a very important precedent: people can make decisions and solve global problems,” Dr. Molina added.
In the first weeks in the laboratory, the import of their work soon became clear to them. As Dr. Rowland wrote in an autobiographical essay for the Nobel committee, “Within three months, Mario and I realized that this was not just a scientific question, challenging and interesting to us, but a potentially grave environmental problem.”
One evening, as that realization was dawning, according to an article in The Los Angeles Times, Dr. Rowland’s wife, Joan, asked how his research was going. “It’s going very well,” he said. “It just means, I think, the end of the world.”
Dr. Rowland met Joan Lundberg while he was studying for his doctorate at the University of Chicago. She was a Chicago graduate. At the same time, he was playing basketball for the university (Chicago allowed graduate students to play on its teams) and semi-professional baseball during the summer. He received his doctorate and married Ms. Lundberg in 1952. She survives him, as do their two children, Jeffrey and Ingrid, and two grandchildren.
Dr. Rowland was born on June 28, 1927, in the small Ohio town of Delaware, the second of three sons of Sidney A. Rowland, a mathematics professor at Ohio Wesleyan University, and Margaret Drake Rowland, a Latin teacher. Dr. Rowland enrolled at the university after graduating from high school in 1943 at the age of 15.
After two years, he took time off from college to join the Navy and teach radar operators. After returning and graduating, he enrolled at Chicago, where he studied with Willard F. Libby, who later won the 1960 Nobel Prize for his work on carbon dating.
After completing his doctorate, Dr. Rowland taught at Princeton and the University of Kansas before moving to the new University of California campus at Irvine in 1965 to become the first chairman of its chemistry department.
As a researcher and faculty member, Dr. Rowland was sensitive to the human side of science — the egos and rivalries that can be bound up in research. When Dr. Rowland was asked around the time of the Nobel ceremony if he considered himself a hero, he said, Not really. As Dr. Cicerone paraphrased his reply: When you make a big discovery, you either show that everybody else was wrong, or that they missed something important. How do you think that makes them feel?
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