The scientists I looked up to at the beginning were not Latino.

Host: The university campus lay under a pale winter moon, its halls emptied of students, its windows glowing like quiet thoughts still awake. A faint breeze stirred the fallen leaves across the marble steps, whispering against the columns of the old science building.

Inside, the lab was still alive — lights humming, machines clicking, glassware glinting under fluorescent glow. Steam rose gently from a beaker. Notes cluttered the table, written in the handwriting of people trying to understand the world by breaking it down into numbers.

Jack stood by the chalkboard, hands in his pockets, his eyes tracing the formulae like someone reading a sacred text he didn’t believe in. Jeeny, sitting on the lab stool, adjusted her glasses, her fingers tapping against a worn photograph — a picture of Mario J. Molina smiling, his lab coat marked with the stains of work and discovery.

Host: The night felt like a threshold — the moment between doubt and faith, between the old world and the one struggling to be born.

Jeeny: “Mario Molina once said, ‘The scientists I looked up to at the beginning were not Latino. They were famous scientists of many years ago, like Madame Curie. Later, I realized that there were also, but a very few, Latino scientists. There were good ones, but very few, because there wasn't as much a tradition to be a scientist in our culture. But this is changing.’”

Host: Her voice echoed softly off the tiles, carried by the hum of the ventilation fans, filled with something — hope, maybe, or the sound of something long overdue.

Jack: “Changing? Sure. But not fast enough.”

Jeeny: “Change never is. But it’s happening. You can feel it, even in rooms like this.”

Jack: “I don’t know, Jeeny. Science is supposed to be universal, right? Equations don’t have accents. Why do we need to talk about culture in a lab?”

Host: She looked at him — not angry, but sad, the way someone looks at a wound they thought had healed.

Jeeny: “Because people do. And people build the labs. They design who gets to be inside them.”

Jack: “You think science discriminates?”

Jeeny: “Not the science — the scientists.”

Host: Jack frowned, picking up a piece of chalk. He wrote something on the board — an equation, elegant and cold.

Jack: “Two plus two is still four, whether you’re Latino, Asian, or Martian. Truth doesn’t care about where you come from.”

Jeeny: “But access does. Opportunity does. Molina wasn’t just talking about representation — he was talking about inheritance. About how in some cultures, kids grow up dreaming of being poets or athletes, not physicists. Because no one tells them science belongs to them too.”

Host: The chalk broke in Jack’s hand, a small crack echoing louder than expected.

Jack: “So what? You want to make culture do the work that curiosity should do?”

Jeeny: “Curiosity isn’t born in a vacuum, Jack. It’s born in stories. And stories come from culture. You can’t aspire to something you’ve never seen reflected in your world.”

Host: A long pause. The machines whirred, a steady mechanical heartbeat against the silence.

Jack: “When I was a kid, my heroes were astronauts. Didn’t matter what color they were. I didn’t care. I just wanted to leave the ground.”

Jeeny: “That’s because you had astronauts to look up to.”

Host: He looked at her, not defensively now, but with something like understanding dawning — slow, reluctant, but real.

Jeeny: “Imagine being a little girl in Mexico, or Colombia, or the Dominican Republic, dreaming about atoms and ozone layers, but never seeing anyone who looks like you holding a Nobel Prize. Molina changed that. He didn’t just win — he proved it could be done.”

Jack: “He fixed the ozone problem, didn’t he? The CFCs — the chlorofluorocarbons.”

Jeeny: “Yes. He and Rowland. They discovered the damage humans were doing to the atmosphere. But Molina’s real discovery was something bigger — that the power to understand and protect the planet isn’t limited by language or skin.”

Host: The light above them flickered once, briefly plunging the lab into a ghostly half-darkness, before humming back to life.

Jack: “So you think that’s what he meant — that science needs more voices, not just more results.”

Jeeny: “Exactly. Because if only one kind of voice speaks, we only get one kind of truth.”

Host: Jack leaned against the table, his fingers brushing over a small vial of liquid nitrogen, watching it smoke like ghosts escaping.

Jack: “I used to think science was pure — like math, untouchable by bias. But maybe it’s just another mirror of who we are.”

Jeeny: “It is. Every experiment reflects its experimenters.”

Host: The clock ticked past midnight. The building was nearly silent now. Somewhere, a janitor’s mop squeaked softly against the floor — the small, faithful music of human persistence.

Jeeny: “You know what’s poetic about Molina’s words?”

Jack: “What?”

Jeeny: “He says ‘This is changing.’ Not ‘It has changed.’ Not ‘It will.’ He said it in the middle of the storm, when it wasn’t certain. That’s faith disguised as observation.”

Host: Her eyes glowed faintly in the fluorescent light — fierce, alive, unyielding.

Jack: “Faith in culture. Faith in people.”

Jeeny: “Faith that science belongs to everyone — not just those who inherited the right textbooks.”

Host: He smiled, the faintest curve of lips softened by humility.

Jack: “You’d make a good scientist.”

Jeeny: “Maybe. But I’d rather be the one reminding the scientists what they’re fighting for.”

Host: They both laughed — quietly, wearily — the kind of laugh that happens when you’ve found something real at the bottom of a long argument.

Jack: “You ever wonder if Molina felt alone?”

Jeeny: “Of course he did. All pioneers do. But that’s what makes the path visible for the next ones.”

Host: Jack nodded slowly, his gaze drifting to the photo again — Molina smiling, not like a man who conquered anything, but like one who finally found room for others to stand beside him.

Jack: “You know, I think I get it now. The ozone hole wasn’t just in the sky. It was in our vision of who gets to matter.”

Jeeny: Softly. “And he patched both.”

Host: Outside, the wind rose — a sound like the whisper of progress, quiet, but moving. The moonlight spilled through the window, painting the lab in soft silver, turning every surface — the glassware, the equations, the tired hands of two thinkers — into reflections of something larger.

Jack: “So it’s changing.”

Jeeny: “Yes. Slowly. Like all revolutions worth having.”

Host: The camera pulled back — past the lab, past the sleeping campus, up into the night sky, where a thin, perfect layer of ozone shimmered invisibly between humanity and the stars.

And in that still, wordless height, Molina’s voice seemed to echo — not in celebration, but in quiet continuity:

“There weren’t many before us. But now there will be more. This is changing.”

Host: The scene faded, leaving only the faint hum of electricity — the sound of a world still learning to include every one of its dreamers.