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Many scientists sneered when Paul Crutzen, on the left in the picture, proposed man-made chemicals as a threat to the earth's ozone shield. But skepticism faded when an ozone "hole" was found over Antarctica in 1985. Crutzen, a Dutch chemist, fingered nitrogen oxides, but American F. Sherwood Rowland, center, and his Mexican postdoctoral student, Mario Molina, spotted the major culprit: chemicals called chlorofluorocarbons, which broke up in the atmosphere, releasing ozone-wrecking chlorine atoms. The 1987 Montreal Protocol phasing out cfcs followed--as did Nobel Prizes for the sci-sleuths.
JANE GOODALL 1934-
She irked fellow scientists by giving her subjects real names and imputing humanlike motives to them. But Jane Goodall's iconoclastic studies of the chimpanzees of East Africa's Gombe forest led to a totally new view of these primates. Supersmart, skilled toolmakers and capable of happiness, pain and anger, the chimps, she discovered, form societies almost as complex as ours with matriarchs, politicking and such nastiness as tribal wars. Having shown we're not separated from other animals by "an unbridgeable chasm," the elegant British researcher is crusading to save the world's remaining chimps.
E.O. WILSON 1929-
Pixieish as he may look, Harvard entomologist E.O. (for Edward Osborne) Wilson once stirred anger with ideas that he dubbed "sociobiology." In the 1970s, he got doused with a pitcher of cold water for his claim that such human behavior as sexuality, aggression and altruism had a genetic basis. Now, however, the two-time Pulitzer prizewinner (On Human Nature, The Ants) is almost universally revered for articulating the importance of biodiversity--the intricate web of plant and animal species, including his beloved ants, that keeps Earth healthy.
GEORGE SCHALLER 1933-
Once, when a Bengal tiger chased him up a tree, George Schaller clapped his hands and shouted, "Go away, tiger, go away!" The big cat walked off. The incident illustrates the German-born biologist's first rule: Don't study animals along the barrel of a gun. With just notebook and camera, he has followed lions in Africa, wild sheep in Tibet and giant pandas in China. His findings, popularized in books like The Serengeti Lion, have upset myths (gorilla aggressiveness, for instance), proved the value of predators and shown why you can't save animals without saving habitat.
COMMUNICATORS
RACHEL CARSON
1907-1964
Just as Abe Lincoln greeted Harriet Beecher Stowe, author of the antislavery novel Uncle Tom's Cabin, as "the little lady who started this whole thing," so environmentalists see Rachel Carson for her role in their contemporary war. A marine biologist, she wrote three poetic books about the sea. But it was her last book, Silent Spring (1962), that struck like a thunderclap, documenting the deadly carnage wrought by pesticides, notably DDT. Their victims were not only springtime birds, she said, but every human being "from the moment of conception until death." Some scientists called her hysterically alarmist, but the public took her seriously, forming the first grassroots environmental groups, while President Kennedy and the U.S. Congress began studies that ultimately vindicated her. She is deservedly hailed as the mother of modern environmentalism.
JACQUES-YVES COUSTEAU 1910-1997