Mario Molina Interview (page: 6 / 8) Nobel Prize in Chemistry	Print Interview

Was there a particular person who gave you your first break? Could you tell us what he or she saw in you?

Mario Molina: Perhaps it started in high school, with these teachers that I mentioned a little while ago, that allowed me the opportunity to go beyond the normal curriculum, to pursue some more complicated problems. But it was really in college. That's the nature of a Ph.D. thesis, to try to find something new and then to find encouragement from your peers, and in thse days, my Ph.D. advisor, Professor Pimentel, really encouraged me to pursue this line of thinking, to try to find new things, to look at the overall picture of how the world functions and go to more and more important problems.

Were you always confident that you were destined to be an achiever in this field? Were you hoping to make this kind of revelatory discovery?

Mario Molina: Well, my motivation was not really to get prizes or so forth. It was the nature of the work itself. I was always motivated to discover new things, and at some stage combine them with things that affect society. So it's this combination that was important for me. But perhaps it was natural then, that indeed, if the discoveries were important, if the impacts to society were important, that would be an additional dimension. I did not really consider it explicitly at the beginning.

How did your studies contribute to this understanding?

Get the Flash Player to see this video. Mario Molina: One of the important aspects of scientific research is this attitude of learning continuously. In fact, the problem that we tackled -- it has to do with the way chemicals function in the environment -- is very interdisciplinary. So an aspect of solving this problem is to be ready to learn new fields. We have to learn how the atmosphere functions. So it's a continuous learning, a continuous questioning also. So that's where, of course, the biggest preparation that I had was very important. Of course, one needs a very solid preparation -- in my case it was fundamental chemistry -- but I had to learn many other things along the way.

In addition to a passion for discovery, you feel a very strong passion for benefiting mankind with your work. Can you talk about that for a moment?

Mario Molina: Yes. I think it is pretty important to realize the consequences of these activities -- on the one hand of myself as a scientist, doing research, how it can be used, but on the other hand, the consequences of all the way that society is evolving. I think we have some very challenging problems ahead of us. Population is growing at a tremendous rate. Developing countries are of course developing, and they need to achieve better standards of living. But that means that we're going to face some very serious problems, particularly next century, as all these activities begin to have even more and more effects on the environment. So for me, it's a very important drive to try to do something to make sure that society moves in the right direction, to make sure that our kids, future generations, have the same options that we have now. It's just something that I'm convinced needs to be done.

On a global basis?

Mario Molina: On a global basis. I'm worried about two types of problems that we have. In terms of effects on the environment, one is very easy: pollution in cities. There are many large cities now, all over the world, that are highly polluted, and you just have to visit the cities and see what the problems are. If you take that pollution together with pollution coming from the burning of forests, for example, it's beginning to be on such a large scale that it is becoming a global problem. And it's only going to get worse as developing countries continue with their economic growth. And then we have a second set of problems, like the ones dealing with the ozone layer that I was involved with, that are not as visible. It's not as obvious that they are happening. And that has to do with consequences on the global environment, effects that can occur far away from the places where the emissions occur. But if you take a combination of these two, that just means that the society has to move in new directions -- again, to make sure that we can facilitate progress everywhere in the world, but not in the same way that it has happened in the past. Developing countries cannot develop in the same way that the industrialized nations of the West have done. There's just no room for that much pollution in our planet, which after all, is not that large, considering how many people are coming on board.

Are there things you saw in your native land, Mexico, that inspired you to pursue this?

Get the Flash Player to see this video. Mario Molina: When I was a child, nobody really worried about pollution in Mexico in general. It was something that, I remember thinking that it's not something Mexico has a luxury to worry about. There were other more important worries. What's really happened is that the pollution in Mexico City, for example, is so notorious, it's so bad that it is very much a local worry. It is not a matter of not having the luxury to do that, but it's essential to worry about it to prevent damage to the health of very many people. So there has been a very large change in attitude, certainly in Mexico, and in many other developing countries, that it's not a luxury to worry about this, but it's very important, because otherwise it costs a lot more to repair the damage. If you anticipate all these problems that can happen, you can achieve higher quality of life, higher standards of living, at a much lower cost. And of course, we have the example of the former Soviet Union and Eastern countries, where again, for them the environment -- environmental effects -- were very low priority. And of course, we've seen the enormous damage that many cities and many places have, and how terribly expensive it is to repair it now. So the message is that it's not a luxury, it's really essential to incorporate the environment as an integral part of the economy, as an integral part of what we require as quality of life.

Did the air pollution in Mexico City motivate your interest in this area?

Mario Molina: As a child, when I was living in Mexico, it was not something that I noticed very strongly, but more something that evolved when I was finishing my Ph.D. It was then, looking at what was happening in the world, that I realized I could actually combine this passion that I had to do scientific research, to do "pure science," as we called it at the time. Now of course I call it "fundamental science." It need not be pure in that sense. It could be applied. It could do some benefit for society. So it's quite possible to do first-rate science, and at the same time, very applied in terms of solving actual problems, problems that society needs to get solved. So that's an important conclusion that I arrived at much later. I didn't have that vision when I was a very young student, this possibility of combining scientific research and finding solutions to problems at the same time, doing some benefit for society.

What vision did you have at that time, and how has that changed as you've increased your discoveries?

Mario Molina: Well, early on I simply had the vision that finding out new things, finding out how nature works, discovering new aspects of knowledge that had been previously thought of, that that was important. I still think that, indirectly, that can only benefit society and mankind, particularly if it is not misused. Science itself may not be good or bad, but if it's properly used we simply have more options to solve these difficult problems. But again, initially I did not make that close connection between discoveries and benefit to society. The change was to realize that there are so many important problems that we have, that it is essential to really try to solve them head on. To try to use some of our best minds to anticipate some even more serious problems that we might have next century, to ease the road for future generations.

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