To understand why Oct. 11, 1995, was such a big deal for UC Irvine and two of the school’s best-known scientists – the late Sherwood “Sherry” Rowland, a radiochemist who theorized that man-made stuff was eroding the ozone layer, and the late Fred Reines, a physicist who proved the existence of neutrinos – you have to consider the pop-culture relevance of science-oriented Nobel prizes.
For non-scientists, Nobel news can rise to the level of almost interesting.
Maybe you see a Nobel science story and read about why a particular prize was awarded, learning a little about physics or math or whatever until the information becomes too complicated. Maybe you see a picture and wonder how somebody who looks like your sweetest auntie is also professor-level smart. Or, maybe, you skip the news entirely until the Peace Prize is awarded but still understand, somehow, that any Nobel Prize is a big deal.
But for scientists, Nobels are bigger than big. Think Oscar plus a Pulitzer, plus, say, soccer’s biggest prize, the Ballon d’Or.
Other awards might honor scientific achievement and carry prestige within a specific field, but they don’t come with much in the way of non-scientific fame. For people who can spend entire careers focused on arcane problems or ideas, even a little popular recognition can be a life-changing path to consulting gigs or long-term funding or, with luck, to others building on your work after you’re gone.
For Rowland and Reines – and for their employer, UC Irvine – the separate Nobel prizes each man won 30 years ago this week were all of that and more.
The Day
“The morning was just insanely chaotic,” said Barbara Chisholm, an administrative analyst at UC Irvine who was assistant to Rowland the day he was one of three people to win the 1995 Nobel Prize in chemistry for their work regarding ozone depletion.
“You’ve got to remember, technology wasn’t the same,” she added. “The day before Dr. Rowland won, his internet started working for the first time. News was still spread by word of mouth or by phone.”
That morning, a Wednesday, it was mostly by phone. Chisholm’s three-line headset was clogged with calls, most from people eager to be sure that Rowland was aware that Reines, a long-time colleague (and, like Rowland, one of two professors who launched science departments when UCI opened in 1965) had won the 1995 Nobel for physics.
Finally, one of the callers was a top official at UCI who got Rowland, not Chisholm, on the line. Like the others, he wanted to tell Rowland about Reines’ award.
“Yeah,” Rowland replied, almost casually. “I won one, too.”
A few schools – CalTech, MIT, Columbia and UC Berkeley this year – have been connected to multiple Nobel winners in the same year. Until 1995, UC Irvine would have been viewed as a long shot to join that list.
“Winning two different Nobels, in the same year, was kind of unheard of, or unimaginable, for UCI,” Chisholm said. “So it was a really big thing in terms of the school’s reputation.
“I think, outside of this area, a lot of people didn’t really know about UCI,” she added. “But they did after that.”
By mid-morning, Chisholm said, a few scientists in the chemistry department were tipsy from champagne. And the usually reserved Rowland – who didn’t drink alcohol – was posing for photos, raising a carton of milk alongside flutes and bottles.
For Reines, who by the autumn of 1995 appeared to be struggling with cognitive health issues, news of the award apparently sparked a brief rally. He came into the office at the physics department and, according to people who knew him at the time, seemed to be more alert. A few weeks later, at the Nobel ceremony in Sweden, Reines – an enthusiastic baritone who once sang with the light opera troop at Los Alamos, New Mexico, where his work helped to usher in the nuclear age – sang along in a choir with other winners.
The Work
Another thing you should know about Nobel Prizes: They’re usually late.
That’s by design. Science and math and economics and many of the other fields tracked by the Nobel committee are busy worlds, with lots of people making lots of discoveries and insights. It can take decades, and context, to know which advances are monumental and which fall into the category of important-but-smaller steps forward.
The Nobels awarded in 1995 followed that basic premise. The work that eventually meant recognition for Rowland and Reines had happened decades earlier.
Reines, who was 77 when he won the Nobel, spent much of World War II working on the Manhattan Project, which developed the atom bomb at secret labs in Los Alamos. He then spent about 15 post-war years continuing to work on atomic issues in Los Alamos, where he studied, among other things, the after-effects of nuclear explosions.
During this period, Reines and a Los Alamos co-worker, Clyde Cowan, started to work on detecting neutrinos, a subatomic particle that had been theorized in the 1930s but, in the mid-1950s, had not been proven to exist.
In 1956, after conducting what was known as the Cowan-Reines Neutrino Experiment at the Savannah River nuclear reactor in South Carolina, they published a paper showing how they “observed the electron neutrino,” Reines wrote later.
The Nobel committee echoed that, saying Reines’ honor was “for the detection of the neutrino.”
Rowland, who was 68 when he won the Nobel, first published groundbreaking ozone work in the 1970s.
After starting his career working in carbon dating – a process that involves tracking the decay of radioactive isotopes – the former semi-pro baseball player studied radiochemistry, which involves the use of radioactive substances in everything from power to medicine.
In the early 1970s, less than a decade after he’d launched the chemistry department at UCI, Rowland started working on atmospheric calculations with Mario J. Molina, a Mexico-born chemical engineer who studied and taught at UC Berkeley. In 1974, Rowland and Molina published a study that theorized how man-made organic compound gases – including chemicals used in everything from air conditioners to asthma inhalers – could be broken down by the sun at higher elevations and, once broken down, could degrade the ozone layer, which protects life on Earth from radiation.
The basic idea – that a disappearing ozone layer would be bad thing, and man-made stuff was making it happen – caught on. Within a couple years, the somewhat inaccurate idea of a growing “hole in the ozone layer,” likely growing over the poles, became cocktail party banter.
“What Sherry and Mario had was more of a theory initially, with no measurements. But it was a paper that explained, simply, that this is what could happen, and it was powerful,” said Donald J. Blake, a distinguished professor of chemistry at UC Irvine who studied under Rowland and worked with him for decades.
By the late 1970s, California and other states were banning the use of the chemicals noted by Rowland and Molina.
“If true, and left unattended, what they were saying meant we were releasing gases into the atmosphere that could lead to ozone loss everywhere,” Blake added. “That was something everybody could understand.”
Two decades later, the Nobel commentary on their 1995 award, which also included Dutch-born meteorologist Paul J. Crutzen, was to the point: “for their work in atmospheric chemistry, particularly concerning the formation and decomposition of ozone.”
The Legacies
Neutrinos, in the early 1950s, were intriguing to many but studied by few. The paper published by Reines and Cowan in 1956, demonstrating the existence of neutrinos, changed that, kicking off nothing less than a new branch of science.
Today, there are a few thousand scientists working on neutrino research in places as diverse as the Super-Kamiokande (Super-K) project in Japan and the detector located about a mile underground at the Sanford Underground Research Facility in South Dakota and a 5,000-sensor neutrino observatory on the South Pole known as IceCube.
“They’re called mysterious particles, yet they’re so damn important to the universe,” said Hank Sobel, an emeritus professor of physics at UCI and a former Reines graduate student who has spent his career building on the neutrino discovery from 1956 and who has helped lead some of the research in Japan and the United States.
Neutrinos are a lot of things; impossibly small with no electric charge and laughably difficult to detect. They’re also somewhat solitary, because they rarely interact with matter. And they’re ubiquitous – several billion neutrinos are passing through your body as you read this sentence.
But a big reason science is interested in neutrinos is this: They’re historical documents.
Neutrinos are remnants of the Big Bang, and so-called “relic” neutrinos were created within one second of the Big Bang and continue to travel through the universe. Knowing more about them means knowing more about the biggest mysteries of all existence. For scientists of a certain bent, it’s intoxicating stuff.
“Like a lot of basic knowledge, the work in neutrino research has created things that are of use … MRI machines and better and better magnets,” Sobel said.
“But, really, studying neutrinos is a way of trying to understand why the universe is as it is,” he added.
“A big question right now is about dark matter. Why is it what it is? What is it? Those are things that still compel me.
“It’s hard,” Sobel added. “It’s hard and it’s fun. I’m an experimentalist; I still like working with things and building with my hands. That’s what this research is about.”
The echo from Rowland’s work might be easier to understand.
In 1987, eight years before Rowland’s Nobel, countries around the world agreed to form the Montreal Protocol on Substances that Deplete the Ozone Layer, a self-explanatory international treaty that ends the use of the chemicals that eat ozone. It was sparked by research by Rowland and others, which eventually proved the theories about ozone depletion and how it might be reversed.
According to federal reports and international monitoring, the Montreal Protocol has indeed reversed ozone degradation. The once-shrinking ozone layer is on track to full recovery within the next century.
Along with that, according to the nonprofit Climate Leadership Council, a more robust ozone layer has helped reduce skin cancers and other radiation-related illness, with an estimated 3 million people alive today who otherwise would have died if the ozone layer had continued to degrade at the rates tracked in the 1970s and ’80s. An improved ozone layer also has blunted some effects of global warming – including the loss of phytoplankton, which have been reduced because of steps launched by the agreement.
UCI’s Blake suggests those gains are direct results of the work by Rowland and others. He also believes his friend – who he said “autographed a lot of chemistry books after he won the Nobel” – would be frustrated to see the world react differently to global warming than it did to ozone.
But Blake argues attitude, as much as science, is Rowland’s true legacy.
“I started with him when I was a graduate student. And he told us, all of us, ‘If you have a chance, at some junction in your career, to work on issues that benefit mankind, I suggest you try,’” Blake said.
“That’s something I’ve always remembered.”
