Nobel Chemistry Prize Winner Spurred by Wide-Ranging Interests

When the 1995 Nobel Prizes were announced last October, Paul J. Crutzen was o­n vacation in Spain with his wife, Terttu. So when journalists called at the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry in Mainz, Germany, where Crutzen is director of the Air Chemistry Division, they interviewed o­ne of his senior colleagues instead. When informed that Crutzen had won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry, the colleague replied: "What for?"

The question seemed to imply surprise that Crutzen had won the prize, according to Thomas E. Graedel, distinguished member of the technical staff at AT&T Bell Laboratories, Murray Hill, N.J., who tells the anecdote. "But what the colleague meant was: There are so many things that Crutzen could have been cited for - for example, his work o­n biomass burning, his work o­n defining the methane cycle in the atmosphere, or his work o­n defining the sulfur cycle in the stratosphere," says Graedel. "He got into and defined many areas that nobody else up to that time had paid much attention to."

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