The Man Who Killed Millions and Saved Billions (Clean Version)

Fritz Haber won the 1918 Nobel Prize for Chemistry for solving one of humanity's biggest problems, directly responsible for the lives of 4 billion people today.

• Many of his peers refused to attend the ceremony • Two other Nobel Prize winners rejected their awards in protest • The New York Times published a scathing article about him

Haber is simultaneously one of the most impactful and tragic scientists of all time, having shaped the modern world perhaps more than any other single person.

Why would a scientist credited with saving billions of lives face such rejection and protest from the scientific community?

Off the coast of Peru are islands where millions of seabirds gather, creating cliffs of solidified bird poop 30 meters high, accumulated over millennia in the hot, dry region.

• Bird guano was big business by the mid-1800s • Prices rose as high as $76 per pound • Four pounds of guano could be traded for one pound of gold

Guano is up to 20% nitrogen, essential for soil fertility. Incan farmers discovered that adding guano made crops grow taller and enabled farming in previously unfarmable places, expanding their empire.

• In 1865, Spain went to war against Peru, Chile, Ecuador, and Bolivia for control of guano-laden islands • By 1872, guano was running out and Peru banned further exports • The world faced a critical nitrogen shortage

• Nitrogen is the fourth most common element in the human body • Part of amino acids that form proteins • Component of hemoglobin carrying oxygen in red blood cells • Central component of DNA and RNA

Farming the same soil year after year harvests nitrogen from it. Nitrogen-deficient plants can't produce enough chlorophyll, their leaves turn yellow, they're more susceptible to pests and disease, and yields decrease.

In 1898, British chemist William Crooks warned that within 30 years, with growing population and dwindling nitrogen supplies, people worldwide would die of starvation. He called on chemists to solve the problem through laboratory research.

• 78% of air is nitrogen but in a form plants and animals can't use • Two nitrogen atoms form a triple bond requiring 9.8 electron volts to break—the strongest chemical bond in nature • Chemists attempted to create ammonia from nitrogen and hydrogen for over a hundred years, all failed

Fritz Haber was 36 years old, a low-level academic at University of Karlsruhe with a two-year-old son named Herman and wife Clara, one of the first women to earn a PhD in chemistry.

• Combined nitrogen and hydrogen at high pressure and high temperature • Used a catalyst to lower the energy required to split nitrogen • Invented new experimental apparatus to tolerate ever higher temperatures and pressures • Obtained osmium from a light bulb manufacturer to use as a catalyst

In the third week of March 1909, under 200 atmospheres and 500 degrees Celsius, the triple nitrogen bond broke apart. Six percent of the gas mixture converted to ammonia, and one milliliter dripped out into a beaker, prompting Haber to rush through the lab yelling 'There's ammonia.'

• BASF commercialized the Haber process • Within four years, opened a factory producing five tons of ammonia daily • People spoke of 'making bread from the air' • Farmers grew four times as much food on the same land • Earth's population quadrupled as a result

The invention made Haber wealthy. He was promoted to founding director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physical Chemistry in Berlin and befriended top scientists of his era including Max Planck, Max Born, and Albert Einstein.

• Around 50% of nitrogen atoms in human bodies came from the Haber process • Earth supports 4 billion more people today than it could without nitrogen fertilizer • There's a good chance most people owe their existence to Haber's invention

Despite being well-regarded by the scientific community and befriending Einstein, Haber was shunned by colleagues when he won the Nobel Prize.

Why would the inventor of a process that saved billions of lives face rejection from his peers?

When World War I broke out, Haber volunteered for military duty. Unlike pacifist Einstein who denounced the war, Haber was a patriot wanting to use his expertise to help his country.

• A few months into the war, Germany was running out of gunpowder and explosives • Ammonium nitrate is both an excellent fertilizer and an explosive • Haber convinced his superiors to convert ammonia factories to create nitrate for explosives instead • His process became the heart of the German war machine

After witnessing an unimpressive chemical weapons test in December 1914, Haber set out to create a gas deadly at low concentrations and heavier than air to sink into enemy trenches. Within months, he settled on chlorine gas.

• At 6 p.m. on April 22, 1915, Germany released 168 tons of chlorine from 5,000 gas cylinders toward Allied trenches • Chlorine gas being 2.5 times heavier than air sank into trenches • Soldiers inhaling the gas had their lungs fill with liquid, effectively drowning on dry land • More than 5,000 Allied soldiers died in the first attack

Haber was promoted to the rank of captain. He spent the rest of the war running his institute researching chemical weapons, gas masks, and pesticides.

• By 1917, the institute employed 1,500 people • 150 of those employees were scientists • It functioned like a mini Manhattan Project but for chemical weapons

In total, 100,000 soldiers were killed by chemical weapons in World War I, weapons that Haber's research and direction made possible.

When Germany surrendered, Haber was crushed. All the money he made from his ammonia patent was lost to hyperinflation. He attempted to distill gold from seawater to help pay Germany's war debt, but the project was futile.

• In 1933, the Nazis passed a law firing all Jewish civil servants including scientists • Haber was Jewish but never practiced the religion • His military service exempted him from the law • He resigned from his director role in solidarity with Jewish scientists at the institute

• Immediately after World War I, Haber's Institute developed a cyanide-based insecticide • A foul-smelling chemical was added to alert people to danger • The resulting gas was called Zyklon B • A decade after Haber's death, the Nazis had chemists remove the warning chemical • This form of Zyklon B was then used in the Holocaust

In 1934, Haber died of heart failure in a hotel room in Basel, Switzerland.

The chemical developed at Haber's Institute—intended to protect people from insecticide poison—was weaponized by the Nazis without its warning component and used to perpetrate the Holocaust.

• One view portrays Haber as a villain for enabling chemical weapons • Another view celebrates him as a hero for inventing a process feeding half the world • A third approach regards him as irrelevant, arguing someone else would have solved nitrogen fixation and other scientists were developing chemical weapons anyway

• Over centuries, science and technology have improved lives immeasurably • They have also given us ever-increasing ways to destroy ourselves • Every bit of information is a potential double-edged sword • Scientists don't know the outcome of their research or how it might later be used

Ammonium nitrate is both a fertilizer that feeds the world and an explosive that can destroy it, as demonstrated by the devastating 2020 Beirut explosion that killed 217 people and was heard hundreds of kilometers away.

How do we keep increasing our knowledge and control of the natural world without destroying ourselves and everything else on this planet in the process?