Mario Molina: When I finished my Ph.D., I moved to Irvine, one of the campuses of the University of California, working with Sherry Rowland. Professor Rowland had a group doing very basic science at that time. But as a postdoctoral student — that’s how I joined his group — we decided to move into a new field for us, which was the chemistry of the atmosphere. And again, it was a question of originating just with curiosity. We knew that there were certain industrial compounds that were being released into the atmosphere. The type of chemicals that were being released were similar to those that we were studying from a very fundamental point of view — chemical properties, and so on. How the reactions take place. But something new happened at that time that I had not done in my earlier stories, which is looking at the natural environment. Looking at the way the world functions as a whole. In other words, we became interested in environmental issues. So it was a new field for me at that time. But it was this basic drive, basic curiosity, to find out how things work. In this case, not how it works, but what is the consequence of society releasing something to the environment that wasn’t there before. Could you do any damage? Perhaps not, but we thought it was important to find out anyhow. So that’s how we got started in that problem, and of course eventually realized that there’s not something we were expecting at the beginning, but we did realize that there were important consequences from this apparently harmless human activity of releasing these gases which are not toxic at all, but eventually they decompose and indeed can affect the ozone layer in very significant ways. So it’s again, just that drive of understanding how things work — in this case, what are the consequences of certain activities of society — that motivated us to solve these problems.