Frank Sherwood Rowland

While studying at the University of Chicago Rowland met Joan Lundberg, a student of the same university. They got married on June 7, 1952 and had two children, a daughter named Ingrid and a son named Jeffery.

Towards the end of his life Rowland developed Parkinson’s disease. He died on March 10, 2012 at his home in Corona del Mar, California, from complication arising out of Parkinson’s disease.

In 2007. Mount Rowland in Antarctica was named after him.

Frank Sherwood Rowland was born on June 28, 1927, in Delaware, Ohio. His father, Sydney A. Rowland, was a Professor of Mathematics and the Chairman of the Department at the Ohio Wesleyan University. His mother, Margaret Drake Rowland, taught Latin. He was the second of his parents’ three children.

Frank began his schooling at the age of five at a local public school. He was a brilliant boy and as accelerated promotion was allowed in Delaware school system, he skipped the fourth grade and entered the high school at the age of twelve.

During his high school years, he spent the summer vacations acting as the weatherman at the local voluntary weather station, keeping records of maximum and minimum temperature as well as the total precipitation. It was his first exposure to weather phenomenon and systematic data collection.

In 1943, just few weeks before his sixteenth birthday, Frank Sherwood Rowland graduated from school and entered Ohio Wesleyan University. Because he was not yet eighteen, he could not be enlisted for the military service and so he was few of the male students left in the university.

In 1945, he turned eighteen and joined the US Navy to get trained as a radar operator. The World War II ended in the same year while he was still a trainee. However, he had to wait for fourteen months before he was released from the Navy.

In September 1952, within a month of earning his PhD degree, Rowland joined University of Princeton as an Instructor in the Department of Chemistry. Concurrently, he spent the summers of 1953, 1954 and 1955 working at the Chemistry Department of the Brookhaven National Laboratory.

While working at Brookhaven, he put powdered mixture of the sugar glucose and lithium carbonate into the neutron flux of the nuclear reactor. It resulted in one-step synthesis of radioactive tritium-labeled glucose. This work was noted by the United States Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) and it offered support for continuation of the research.

However, before anything could materialize, he received appointment as an Assistant Professor at the University of Kansas and joined his new post in the summer of 1956. The support promised by AEC also arrived on time.

He therefore, lost no time in gathering a research team, comprising of graduate student and postdoctoral fellows. For next eight years, he worked with this research group, investigating mainly the chemical reactions of energetic tritium atoms.

In August 1964, he moved to Irvin to become Professor of Chemistry and also the first Chairman of the Chemistry Department of the yet-to-be opened University of California. In spite of the transfer, he continued receiving the support from AEC.

Rowland is best known for his work on chlorofluorocarbon compounds and their effects on the atmosphere. In 1974, he along with Mario Molina showed that when CFC rises into the stratosphere, it is bombarded by powerful doses of ultraviolet rays. As a result, the gas splits into chorine and chlorine monoxide.

On further research, they found that a single chlorine atom can absorb more than 100,000 ozone molecules; thus depleting the ozone layer. What is more, these atoms could linger in the stratosphere for up to a century and continue absorbing more ozone molecules.