Mario Molina was born on March 19, 1943, in Mexico. He received his bachelor's degree from the National Autonomous University of Mexico in 1965 and his Ph.D. in physical chemistry from the University of California at Berkeley in 1972. After teaching for a year at the National Autonomous University, he returned to Berkeley as a research associate for one year.

In 1973, Molina joined the research laboratory of F. Sherwood Rowland at the University of California at Irvine. Molina was looking for a topic on which he could do his post-doctoral research with Rowland, and Rowland was ready with a suggestion because he had just come from a scientific meeting where he became interested in the possible effects of an important commercial chemical, trichlorofluoromethane, also known as chlorofluorocarbon-11, or CFC-11. The compound was a member of a widely-successful group of...