Nobel Prize Winner Lauds Global Cooperation Against Ozone Depletion

Global action against ozone depletion marks a major victory in the collaboration between science and social policy, said Dr. David Molina at a luncheon presentation Friday afternoon in Pforzheimer House.

The speech marked the start of a weekend conference on minorities and women in the sciences.

Molina, a professor of earth, atmospheric and planetary sciences at MIT, was one of the three recipients of the 1995 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. He has researched extensively on urban air pollution and was one of the primary investigators on the damaging effects of chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) on the ozone layer.

Recalling the outset of their research on CFCs in the 1970s, Molina said he and his colleagues did not expect to discover such a major connection between CFCs and atmospheric damage.

Researching the effects of an invisible chemical on an invisible layer of the stratosphere was as much a political as a scientific challenge, Molina said. The research team made a conscious effort to talk with the news media and politicians in order to communicate the importance of their discoveries.

Molina’s latest project is a comprehensive study of air pollution in Mexico City. The project is a collaboration of chemists, engineers, economists, sociologists and politicians from Mexico and the United States.

“I think his work is excellent,” said Esther Pearson, a local environmental educator who attended the luncheon. “You always have to think of science going together with ethics and social policy.”

Molina also discussed the need to encourage more minority students to enter science teaching and research.

“Latinos do not have as strong a tradition in the sciences as in the arts and humanities,” Molina said. “We have to entice more people in our community to enter science. We have to communicate how exciting it can be.”

The luncheon, co-sponsored by the Harvard Foundation for Intercultural and Race Relations, Raza, Latinas Unidas and Fuerza Latina, marked the beginning of the Advancing Minorities and Women in Science, Engineering and Mathematics conference.

The conference—held Saturday in the Science Center and Pforzheimer House—featured presentations on chemistry and environmental science. In addition, approximately two hundred students from Boston public middle and high schools participated in science demonstrations run by both professors and Harvard undergraduates.