Molina was born on 19 March 1943 in Mexico City. His father was a lawyer who worked in his private practice and also taught at the National University of Mexico (UNAM), and who later served as the Mexican ambassador to Ethiopia, Australia and the Philippines.

Molina was fascinated with science before he began high school; he began studying amoebae with a toy microscope, and he later converted a spare bathroom in his house into a laboratory. With the help of his chemist aunt, he played with chemistry sets and conducted challenging experiments of the kind more familiar to college students.

At this young age, he knew that he wanted a career in scientific research, foregoing an earlier ambition to become a violinist. His family had a tradition of sending their children abroad for a few years, and because of his interest in chemistry, the 11-year-old Molina was sent to boarding school in Switzerland so that he could learn German (which was seen as an important language for an aspiring chemist to know).

In 1960, Molina began his undergraduate studies at UNAM in chemical engineering, since, unlike straight chemistry, it allowed him to take the mathematics-based courses that would enable him to become a physical chemist. Molina then spent nearly two years as a research student at the University of Freiburg, Germany, followed by several months in Paris studying maths by himself, after which he took a role as Assistant Professor at UNAM. He began his graduate studies in physical chemistry at the University of California at Berkeley in 1968, where he began working with lasers. Molina remembers being dismayed that researchers elsewhere were developing lasers for use as weapons; he wanted his research to benefit society.

Molina completed his doctorate in 1972, and he continued his research at Berkeley for a further year. In 1973, he moved to the University of California, Irvine to join F. Sherwood Rowland’s group as a postdoctoral fellow. There, he and Rowland conducted experiments on the fate of CFCs, commonly found in spray cans and refrigerator cooling systems, when they are released into the atmosphere. The common perception was that these man-made gases are chemically inert, however, after three months of investigations Molina and Rowland produced a theory proposing that ultraviolet radiation breaks down CFCs in the stratosphere into their component elements of chlorine, fluorine and oxygen. Once liberated, chlorine attacks the ozone layer; each chlorine atom capable of destroying around 100,000 ozone molecules.

After publishing their theory in the journal Nature in 1974, Molina and Rowland devoted a significant amount of time promoting it to scientists, as well as taking the unusual step of discussing it with the media and policy makers. They also testified at legislative hearings concerning CFC emissions. It wasn’t until the mid-1980s, when the ozone hole was discovered over Antarctica, that their theory was eventually validated.

In 1975, Molina became a member of the faculty at Irvine, later becoming Associate Professor. He joined the Jet Propulsion Laboratory at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in 1982, and then moved to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1989. Since 2005 he has been working both at the University of California, San Diego and at a centre he set up in Mexico City for strategic studies in energy and the environment. He is married to Guadalupe Alvarez, his second wife, and has a son. As well as receiving numerous awards for his work, Molina also has had an asteroid named after him.

Nobel Prize in Chemistry 1995
Mario Molina’s Nobel Lecture
Mario Molina’s lab page at University of California, San Diego
Molina Center for Energy and the Environment
Wikipedia: Mario Molina