Hot Team: Busy Boss Leads Atmospheric Chemistry Group

F. Sherwood Rowland, president-elect of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and Bren Professor of Chemistry at the University of California, Irvine, leaning back in his desk chair, is about to hold forth on his favorite subject, atmospheric chemistry. But before he can begin, Donald Blake, a senior researcher and Rowland's right-hand man in the lab, pops in the door. Blake, carrying a clipboard with a checklist of discussion items, quickly apologizes for the interruption as he places several pages of data atop the sea of papers and reports covering Rowland's desk. For the next several minutes, the two men converse about the data and a few administrative matters. Then, with a quick smile, Blake waves goodbye and disappears. A veteran of Rowland's atmospheric research lab, Blake has learned it takes a wily aggressiveness to capture a few minutes of Rowland's time. And the competition for that time is getting stiffer and stiffer. This past November, Rowland was voted AAAS's president-elect, an honor that carries with it a considerable number of new responsibilities. Blake and Rowland's work styles are simultaneously opposite and complementary. Blake loves lab work, but complains that he doesn't have as much time for experiments as he would like. Rowland hasn't done regular hands-on lab work in years, yet has superior data analysis skills and an exceptional memory. "He's got this recall that's just unbelievable," Blake says. And while Blake is a stickler about meeting deadlines, Rowland admits he tends to ignore them. This affects certain aspects of the group's work. For instance, the team publishes about 15 papers a year. It could produce many more, but "the bottleneck is here," Rowland says, pointing to his overloaded desk. "They do a draft and it sits until either I get to it or it [becomes] obsolete." Once Criticized, Now Touted The AAAS election is just the latest in a string of honors for the 63-year-old Rowland that includes the 1989 Japan Prize, worth about $400,000, and the Donald Bren Fellowship at UC-Irvine, which comes with a $1 million endowment for research (The Scientist, Nov. 13, 1989, page 25). While the awards honor Rowland for his seminal research, at one time his work won him as many critics as admirers. His controversial findings, published in 1974 (Nature, 249: 810), were the first to show that chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs), commonly used in refrigeration and air conditioning, are involved in destroying stratospheric ozone, the band of gas that filters the earth's exposure to ultraviolet radiation. Rowland conducted the work with Mario Molina, then a postdoc who, like Rowland, had a background in radiochemistry. Initially, meteorologists blasted their work as harebrained, disparaging the findings because they were proposed by radiochemists, who, the critics claimed, were dabbling in atmospheric studies. But now, after more than 15 years' supporting research and studies, the early Rowland-Molina work is recognized by scientists and environmental policymakers alike as an extremely important environmental discovery. It has led to local, national, and international regulations and agreements to control the release of CFCs into the atmosphere. The most significant of these, the Montreal Protocol of 1987 and its later amendments, is an international agreement that seeks to reduce CFC releases. Rowland's latest data, published last October (Nature, 344:430), reveal that unusually high levels of methane gas are leaking from natural gas transmission pipes in Central Europe. Methane contributes to the greenhouse effect, which scientists believe may be leading to global warming. Rowland figures that a significant portion of methane buildup could be reduced by clogging up these Central European leaks. Mission: Atmosphere's Health The methane measurement is an example of how the Rowland team sustains its reputation by continually monitoring the effects of different gases on the health of the atmosphere, particularly on the ozone layer. To diagnose the atmosphere's condition, Rowland's group has three main research activities: chemical analysis in the lab of molecules that are of atmospheric interest, analysis of data accumulated over long periods by his and other labs, and field experiments. Two senior staff members, who have been with Rowland for a long time, help maintain the lab's scientific mission of the atmospheric gas measurements. These scientists, Blake and Rama Iyer, came to Rowland's lab as graduate students and stayed on. Most of the other members of the lab, which typically numbers about 15 researchers, are graduate students who stay as long as it takes to complete their doctorates. Another two are postdocs. Blake's first year of graduate studies with Rowland was 1979; he began work almost immediately on measuring methane in the atmosphere. Blake got his degree in 1984 and has since pursued the methane studies. "One of the reasons we felt that the continuation of that methane series was important was because it was beginning to be used on a global basis by people relying on a relatively few measurements, and we had the latest [data]," Rowland says. "If you're going to try for high reproducibility, you don't want to change anything. You certainly don't want to change operators." Today, Rowland calls Donald Blake "the key to the successful operation of our atmospheric chemistry [work]." Iyer, a radiochemist, oversees much of the laboratory chemical analysis. He first came to Rowland's lab as a graduate student in 1967 and completed his Ph.D. in 1973. With the exception of a brief teaching stint in Brazil, Iyer has been there since. He is, Rowland says, "the corporate memory of the experiments," able to recall instantly who did what, and what the team "found out 10 years ago that the new people wouldn't know about." A Dubious Benefit To answer questions about global warming or about the ozone layer, large-scale data collection is necessary. That means field experiments, one of the team's specialties. "[They] are taking more and more of our time," says Rowland. One might expect that the exotic travel would be one of the perks of working in the Rowland lab. However, not everyone relishes the trips. "They tend to be lonely," says Nicola Blake (no relation to Donald Blake), one of two postdocs in the lab. "I was away for 18 days. New Zealand was very interesting. I took my binoculars and camera. But there's loads of driving. I mean, you're driving all day." Every three months, four or five team members travel four different routes stretching from Alaska to New Zealand, gathering air samples along the way. "What we try to do is get a sample more or less at every five degrees of latitude," Rowland says. "And since we collect them all at the same time, knowledge of the atmosphere and experience in our own measurements have shown that at any given latitude, it usually doesn't depend very much on whether you're collecting on the west coast of Europe or the west coast of the United States, because [the air] mixes." So to make the trips easier, the team confines its routes to the Pacific. In effect, the travelers do a lot of island hopping, then return to analyze the samples. Throughout its history, the Rowland lab has continually extended the range of gases that it monitors. "We started out doing just the few molecules that we could do well. And progressively, we have increased the number of molecules we can do well," Rowland says. "We went from chlorofluorocarbons to methane to carbon monoxide to higher hydrocarbons." Some of the hydrocarbons they have been measuring lately include natural products released by plants. All the while, the team has persevered in measuring chlorofluoro-carbons and contributing to the growing body of knowledge about their effect on the ozone layer. After Rowland and Molina first reported CFC damage to the atmosphere, Rowland successfully pressed for greater regulation of the chemical. Still, CFC use in other products, such as electronics cleaning agents, has increased. In December, Rowland reported at a meeting of the American Geophysical Union that measurements taken in June of CFC concentrations in the atmosphere showed that they are still rising steadily despite various worldwide efforts to phase out their manufacture and use. One notable effect of Rowland's status as a pioneer in CFC research is the mix of students that come to his lab. Before 1974, most of the graduate students would join his team with the intent of going into radiochemistry. Only one or two would be interested in atmospheric chemistry. Today, the numbers are reversed. "All of the graduate students lately want to do atmospheric [work]," Rowland says. Time Is Of The Essence Another effect is that, almost without letup since the 1974 research--and particularly since other studies have corroborated and illuminated the importance of that finding--Rowland's time has been in great demand. "Everybody and his brother want him to be on their committee, to review their books, to give talks, you name it," Donald Blake says. So, increasingly, Blake is responsible for writing papers or helping others in the lab write papers, drafting grant proposals, completing reports, and keeping up with correspondence between Rowland's lab and other labs. "I've been signing his name since 1980. I do a pretty good `F.S. Rowland,'" Blake quips. Rowland's team members praise him for the freedom and flexibility they have in the lab. They get to work on projects they believe are interesting, and they don't have to worry about being suddenly moved from something they want to do to something they really do not want to do. And though they complain that it can be hard getting time with him, they've figured ways to work around that problem. For example, they stake out a table at a restaurant across the green from his office where Rowland often eats, and then nab him. "We actually see more of him at lunchtime than anywhere. Lunchtime is the time when we discuss a lot of science," Donald Blake says. "That stupid phone [in his office constantly interrupts]. Over there [in the restaurant], there's no phone." Kathryn Phillips is a freelance science writer based in Pasadena, Calif.

Hot Team: Busy Boss Leads Atmospheric Chemistry Group

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