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Paul Jozef
Crutzen
Paul Jozef Crutzen (born December
3, 1933, Amsterdam) is a Dutch Nobel prize winning atmospheric chemist.
Crutzen is best known for his
research on ozone depletion. He lists his main research interests as
Stratospheric and tropospheric chemistry, and their role in the biogeochemical
cycles and climate. He currently works at the Department of Atmospheric
Chemistry at the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry, in Mainz, Germany and the
Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California. He was also
a long-time adjunct professor at Georgia Tech.
1976: Outstanding Publication
Award, Environmental Research Laboratories, National Oceanic and Atmospheric
Administration (NOAA), Boulder, Colorado, U.S.A.
1984: Rolex-Discover Scientist of
the Year.
1985: Recipient of the Leo
Szilard Award for "Physics in the Publics Interest" of the American
Physical Society. 1986: Elected to Fellow of the American Geophysical
Union
1989: Tyler Prize for
Environmental Achievement.
1991: Member of the Royal Swedish
Academy of Sciences;
1995: Nobel Prize in Chemistry
(with Dr. M. Molina and Dr. F. S. Rowland, U.S.A.)
1995: Recipient of the Global
Ozone Award for "Outstanding Contribution for the Protection of the Ozone
Layer" by United Nations Environment Programme.
1996: Honorary Member of the
International Ozone Commission 1999: Foreign Member of the Russian Academy of
Sciences
Autobiography
I was born in Amsterdam on
December, 3, 1933, the son of Anna Gurk and Jozef Crutzen. I have one sister who
still lives in Amsterdam with her family. My mother's parents moved to the
industrial Ruhr region in Germany from East Prussia towards the end of the last
century. They were of mixed German and Polish origin. In 1929 at the age of 17,
my mother, moved to Amsterdam to work as a housekeeper. There she met my father.
He came from Vaals, a little town in the southeastern corner of the Netherlands,
Bordering Belgium and Germany and very close to the historical German city of
Aachen. He died in 1977. He had relatives in the Netherlands, Germany and
Belgium. Thus, from both parents I inherited a cosmopolitan view of the world.
My mother, now 84 years old, still lives in Amsterdam, mentally very alert, but
since a few months ago, wheelchair-bound. Despite having worked in several
countries outside The Netherlands since 1958, I have remained a Dutch citizen.
In May, 1940, The Netherlands
were overrun by the German army. In September of the same year I entered
elementary school, "de grote school" (the big school), as it was
popularly called. My six years of elementary school largely overlapped with the
2nd World War. Our school class had to move between different premises in
Amsterdam after the German army had confiscated our original school building.
The last months of the war, between the fall of 1944 and Liberation Day on May,
5, 1945, were particularly horrible. During the cold "hongerwinter"
(winter of famine) of 1944-1945, there was a severe lack of food and heating
fuels. Also water for drinking, cooking and washing was available only in
limited quantities for a few hours per day, causing poor hygienic conditions.
Many died of hunger and disease, including several of my schoolmates. Some
relief came at the beginning of 1945 when the Swedish Red Cross dropped food
supplies on parachutes from airplanes. To welcome them we waved our red, white
and blue Dutch flags in the streets. I had of course not the slightest idea how
important Sweden would become later in my life. We only had a few hours of
school each week, but because of special help from one of the teachers, I was
allowed together with two other schoolmates to continue to the next and final
class of elementary school; unfortunately, all the others lost a year. More or
less normal school education only became possible again with the start of the
new school year in the fall of 1945.
In 1946, after a successful
entrance exam, I entered the "Hogere Burgerschool" (HBS), "Higher
Citizen School", a 5 year long middle school, which prepared for University
entrance. I finished this school in June, 1951, with natural sciences as my
focal subjects. However, we all also had to become proficient in 3 foreign
languages: French, English and German. I got considerable help in learning
languages from my parents: German from my mother, French from my father. During
those years, chemistry definitely was not one of my favourite subjects. They
were mathematics and physics, but I also did very well in the three foreign
languages. During my school years I spent considerable time with a variety of
sports: football, bicycling, and my greatest passion, long distance skating on
the Dutch canals and lakes. I also played chess, which in the Netherlands is
ranked as a "denksport" (thought sport). I read widely about travels
in distant lands, about astronomy, as well as about bridges and tunnels.
Unfortunately, because of a heavy fever, my grades in the final exam of the HBS
were not good enough to qualify for a university study stipend, which was very
hard to obtain at that time, only 6 years after the end of the 2nd world war and
a few years after the end of colonial war in Indonesia, which had been a large
drain on Dutch resources. As I did not want to be a further financial burden on
my parents for another 4 years or more (my father, a waiter, was often
unemployed; my mother worked in the kitchen of a hospital), I chose to attend
the Middelbare Technische School (MTS), middle technical school, now called the
higher technical school (HTS), to train as a civil engineer. Although the MTS
took 3 years, the second year was a practical year during which I earned a
modest salary, enough to live on for about 2 years. From the summer of 1954
until February, 1958, with a 21-month interruption for compulsory military
service in The Netherlands, I worked at the Bridge Construction Bureau of the
City of Amsterdam. In the meanwhile, on a vacation trip in Switzerland, I met a
sweet girl, Terttu Soininen, a student of Finnish history and literature at the
University of Helsinki. A few years later I was able to entice her to marry me.
What a great choice I made! She has been the center of a happy family; without
her support, I would never have been able to devote so much of my time to
studies and science. After our marriage in February, 1958, we settled in Gävle,
a little town about 200 km north of Stockholm, where I had found a job in a
building construction bureau. In December of that same year our daughter Ilona
was born. In March, 1964, she got a little sister, Sylvia. Ilona is a registered
nurse. Her son Jamie Paul is 12 years old. Sylvia is a marketing assistant in
München, Germany. All were present in Stockholm, Uppsala and Gävle during the
Nobel week. We had a happy and unforgettable time.
All this time I had longed for an
academic career. One day, at the beginning of 1958, I saw an advertisement in a
Swedish newspaper from the Department of Meteorology of Stockholm Högskola
(from 1961, Stockholm University) announcing an opening for a computer
programmer. Although I had not the slightest experience in this subject, I
applied for the job and had the great luck to be chosen from among many
candidates. On July 1, 1959, we moved to Stockholm and I started with my second
profession. At that time the Meteorology Institute of Stockholm University (MISU)
and the associated International Meteorological Institute (IMI) were at the
forefront of meteorological research and many top researchers worked in
Stockholm for extended periods. Only about a year earlier the founder of the
institutes, Prof. Gustav Rossby, one of the greatest meteorologists ever, had
died suddenly and was succeeded by Dr. Bert Bolin, another famous meteorologist,
now "retired" as director of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate
Change (IPCC). At that time Stockholm University housed the fastest computers in
the world (BESK and its successor FACIT).
With the exception of
participation in a field campaign in northern Sweden, led by Dr. Georg Witt to
measure the properties of noctilucent clouds, which appear during summer at
about 85 km altitude in the coldest parts of atmosphere, and some programming
work related to this, I was until about 1966 mainly involved in various
meteorological projects, especially helping to build and run some of the first
numerical (barotropic) weather prediction models. I also programmed a model of a
tropical cyclone for a good friend, Hilding Sundquist, now a professor at MISU.
At that time programming was a special art. Advanced general computer languages,
such as Algol or Fortran, had not been developed, so that all programmes had to
be written in specific machine code. One also had to make sure that all
operations yielded numbers in the range -1 < x < 1, which meant that one
had to scale all equations to stay within these limits; otherwise the
computations would yield wrong results.
The great advantage of being at a
university department was that I got the opportunity to follow some of the
lecture courses that were offered at the university. By 1963 I could thus
fulfill the requirement for the filosofie kandidat (corresponding to a Master of
Science) degree, combining the subjects mathematics, mathematical statistics,
and meteorology. Unfortunately, I could include neither physics nor chemistry in
my formal education, because this would have required my participation in time
consuming laboratory excercises. In this way I became a pure theoretician. I
have, however, always felt close to experimental work, which I have strongly
supported during my later years as director of research at the National Center
of Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Boulder, Colorado (1977-1980) and at the
Max-Planck-Institute for Chemistry in Mainz, Germany (since 1980).
Being employed at the
meteorological research institute, it was quite natural to take a meteorological
topic for my filosofie licentiat thesis (comparable to a Ph.D. thesis). Building
on my earlier experience further development of a numerical model of a tropical
cyclone had been proposed to me. However, around 1965 I was given the task of
helping a scientist from the U.S. to develop a numerical model of the oxygen
allotrope distribution in the stratosphere, mesosphere and lower thermosphere.
This project got me highly interested in the photochemistry of atmospheric ozone
and I started an intensive study of the scientific literature. This gave me an
understanding of the status of scientific knowledge about stratospheric
chemistry by the latter half of the 1960's, thus setting the "initial
conditions" for my scientific career. Instead of the initially proposed
research project, I preferred research on stratospheric chemistry, which was
generously accepted. At that time the main topics of research at the
Meteorological Institute at the University of Stockholm were dynamics, cloud
physics, the carbon cycle, studies of the chemical composition of rainwater, and
especially the "acid rain" problem which was largely
"discovered" at MISU through the work of Svante Odén and Erik
Eriksson. Several researchers at MISU, among them Prof. Bolin and my good friend
and fellow student Henning Rodhe, now Professor in Chemical Meteorology at MISU,
got heavily involved in the issue which drew considerable political interest at
the first United Nation Conference on the Environment in Stockholm in 1972.
However, I wanted to do pure science related to natural processes and therefore
I picked stratospheric ozone as my subject, without the slightest anticipation
of what lay ahead. In this choice of research topic I was left totally free. I
can not overstate how I value the generosity and confidence which were conveyed
to me by my supervisors Prof. Georg Witt, an expert on the aeronomy of the upper
atmosphere, and the head of MISU Prof. Bert Bolin. They were always extremely
helpful and showed great interest in the progress of my research.
From Les Prix Nobel. The Nobel
Prizes 1995, Editor Tore Frängsmyr, [Nobel Foundation], Stockholm, 1996
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