Harold S. Johnston

Harold "Hal" Sledge Johnston (born October 11, 1920 in Woodstock , Georgia , † October 20, 2012 in Kensington , California ) was an American chemist who dealt with atmospheric chemistry and chemical kinetics in the gas phase.

Johnston studied chemistry at Emory University with a bachelor's degree in 1941 and at Caltech (interrupted from 1942 to 1945 by World War II as a member of the National Defense Research Committee at Caltech), where he received his doctorate in chemistry in 1948 with Don Merlin Lee Yost . He was then at Stanford University , where he became an Associate Professor , and in 1956/57 Associate Professor at Caltech. In 1955 he became a Sloan Research Fellow . From 1957 until his retirement in 1991 he was Professor of Chemistry at the University of California, Berkeley . From 1966 to 1970 he was dean of the chemistry faculty.

He is best known for his work, published in Science in 1971 , which showed the harmful effects of nitrogen oxides from aircraft on the ozone layer in the stratosphere. This led to a controversial public discussion and fierce criticism, but it also contributed to an incipient public awareness of the global effects of human activity.

He was known for intellectual integrity: when General Motors asked him for an assessment of Arie Jan Haagen-Smit , who is known for his smog research , and he gave it a positive assessment, the collaboration with the car company ended abruptly.

In his 2003 book A bridge not attacked , he tells, in part, from his own experience in the National Defense Research Council (NDRC), Divisions 9 and 10, of US research on chemical warfare agents and the defense against them during World War II. Johnston was involved in the laboratory (phosgene) and then in field tests ( phosgene , mustard gas , cyanogen chloride , hydrocyanic acid ). The tests for the spread of the poison gas clouds took place in the Mojave Desert, on Stinson Beach in California, in a swamp near Bushnell in Florida, on Mount Shasta (the phosgene gas had a skunk odor, according to the residents of the neighboring small town of Shasta did not go unnoticed - when they complained about a skunk plague, the project was canceled) and took place in the jungle on San José Island off Panama.

In 1997 he received the National Medal of Science and in 1993 the NAS Award for Chemistry in Service to Society . He also received the Tyler World Prize for Environmental Achievement in 1983 and the Roger Revelle Medal from the American Geophysical Union in 1998 . He was a Fellow of the National Academy of Sciences (1965), the American Association for the Advancement of Science , the American Physical Society, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1972). In 1960/61 he was a Guggenheim Fellow in Belgium and in 1964 he was visiting professor in Rome.

From 1977 to 1982 he was co-editor of the Journal of Geophysical Research. Dudley R. Herschbach was one of his students at Stanford .

He had been married to Mary Ella Stay since 1948 and had four children.

Fonts

• Gas phase reaction rate theory, New York: Ronald Press 1966
• Gas phase reaction kinetics of neutral oxygen species, National standard reference data series, National Bureau of Standards, Washington DC 1968
• A bridge not attacked: chemical warfare civilian research during World War II, World Scientific 2003

Web links

• Obituary in Berkeley

Individual evidence

1. ^ Chemistry Tree . Title of the dissertation: Part 1: The kinetics of the fast reaction between ozone and nitrogen dioxide, Part 2: A mechanism for the formation of red phosphorous from white phosphorus in solution.
2. ^ Johnston Reduction of Stratospheric Ozone by Nitrogen Oxide Catalysts from Supersonic Transport Exhaust , Science, Volume 173, August 6, 1971, pp. 517-522.
3. ↑ In the process, the aspiring young scientist Samuel Ruben died
4. ↑ Review of the book by John Ellis, Courtland Moon, J. Military History, 69, 2005, 269.