Paul Josef Crutzen (1933)

Crutzen was unable to finance a university education and his grades were not good enough for a scholarship. He attended an intermediate technical education and after his marriage to a Finnish woman became a computer programmer for the Meteorological Institute Stockholm University (MISU) in Sweden. The MISU was willing to pay his university education. In 1963 he graduated and started a PhD. A colleague asked for his assistance in a research project studying the oxygen dispersion in the atmosphere, which first got him interested in the ozone layer.

The ozone layer remained Crutzen's major scientific theme. He received numerous honours for his work and was involved in all the international committees concentrating on solutions to the contamination of the atmosphere. He was a part-time professor at Utrecht University when he received his Nobel Prize in 1995. The prize was generally seen as recognition of the new science of atmospheric chemistry.

Crutzen expects that the measures taken to counter the degradation of ozone, will be effective. 'In thirty or forty years, the hole in the ozone layer will have disappeared' he said in September 2000 in an interview in 'Bild am Sonntag' a German newspaper