I am reading a book on food: “The Omnivores Dilemma” by Michael Pollan, about which one will find ample writings on this blog shortly. In it was an anecdote, or better yet: the really very dramatic story about one of the most important scientists of the 20-th century. The one who – with his invention – made it possible for mankind to survive beyond the boundaries, to human growth, that were initially set by Mother Nature.
The man: Fritz Haber. The invention: a process to artificially bind Nitrogen, the Haber-Bosch process.
The story goes like this: for all life on earth, Nitrogen is a critical ingredient. It is a crucial building block for the formation of amino acids. One of the amino acids is DNA, without which no life is possible. This nitrogen is brought into the cycle of life by specific plants (e.g. Lupine) that can bind nitrogen from the air by using bacteria in their roots. When these plants decay, they become fertilisers for other plants, etc. etc., and the nitrogen from the air is thus bound to the biomass; and through this biomass and over many more steps, to us humans.
The total amount of bound Nitrogen was more or less finite, relative to the existing biomass on earth, because there is a limit to the Nitrogen binding crop that can grow. This meant that the amount of food that could ever be produced was limited too. What followed from this, is that a natural boundary to the amount of feed-able mouths was set. In other words, human kind could only expand in numbers up to a certain level, and not beyond, because there would be a limit to the food available. And this is where Fritz Haber comes in.
By developing a process that could bind Nitrogen from the air in an artificial way, and in effect creating a synthetic fertiliser, Haber was able to blow the ceiling off the maximum amount of sustainable people on this planet. His invention prevented mankind to eventually run into this barrier in a very painful way. It was saved from certain famine and strife for food on a global scale. This feat won Haber the Nobel Prize in 1918.
So why hadn’t I heard of this man Haber before, if he was so important? Why is he not mentioned in the same breath as Newton, Einstein, Darwin and Bohr, if so many of our lives eventually depend on this man’s work? The answer is: because there is a wicked twist to the story of Doctor Haber.
Haber, a chemist, did not only invent artificial fertiliser in the form of artificially bound Nitrogen. The same Nitrogen, as is well known to any reader of “the Anarchist Cookbook”, is the main ingredient for the manufacturing of explosives. And indeed, he put a lot of his professional effort into the arms industry that made the first world war (1914 – 1918) into such a horrible event. It was human slaughtering on an industrial scale. One of the weapons of choice on the German side was battle-gas. And also this was invented and personally tried on the front line by, indeed, Fritz Haber himself!
The man who gave a large portion of the current earth population the means to survive in the first place, was also responsible for many gruesome kills on the battlefield. But it gets even weirder for irony does not stop here. As history wants it, Haber also invented one of the most notorious nerve gasses ever conceived: Zyclon-B, the gas that was used in the Nazi concentration camps to murder 6 million Jews as well as a host of other perceived enemies of the Third Reich.
Even more irony: Haber was also a Jew, and he had to flee from Germany in 1933, when the Hitler gang stepped up their persecution. He died in 1934 – age 65 – in a hotel in Basel, a long time before his invention was put to its destructive use in the German concentration camps. Maybe this was his luck, for he escaped the guilt he should have felt, had he still been alive while his religion-fellows were being killed with an instrument he had provided. In the end, he got a lot older than many of the Jews who found their end in the holocaust.
