"A Grim Enemy For Reasons We Do Not Yet Comprehend"

* This episode contains descriptions of warfare and use of chemical weapons * How do you feed a world that’s running out of food? In this episode of The Rest Is Science, Hannah Fry and Michael Stevens uncover one of the strangest and most unsettling stories in modern science: the tale of the man who learned how to pull fertiliser out of thin air. This discovery transformed agriculture. It made modern civilisation possible. But it also powered explosives, prolonged the First World War, and helped to birth some of the most deadly chemical weapons in history. From battles for bird poop and to the ethics of scientific progress, this is the story of the molecule that changed humanity forever. ------------------ For more information about Cancer Research UK, their research, breakthroughs and how you can support them, visit ⁠⁠https://cancerresearchuk.org/restisscience⁠⁠ Cancer Research UK is a registered charity in England and Wales (1089464), Scotland (SC041666), the Isle of Man (1103) and Jersey (247). A company limited by guarantee. Registered company in England and Wales (4325234) and the Isle of Man (5713F). Registered address: 2 Redman Place, London, E20 1JQ. ------------------- Find The Rest Is Science all over the internet by ⁠⁠clicking here.⁠⁠ ------------------- Video Producer: Adam Thornton + Oli Oakley + Jack MeekAnimator: Sam BensonVideo & Social: Bex TyrrellAssistant Producer: Lucy LipscombeProducer: Simona RataSenior Producer: Lauren Armstrong-CarterHead Of Digital: Samuel OakleyExec Producer: Neil Fearn Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Hannah Fry?

  Welcome to The Rest Is Science. I'm Hannah Fry.

• 0:01Michael Stevens?

  And I'm Michael Stephens.

• 0:02Hannah Fry?

  Okay, Michael, I want you to tell me who you think is the biggest villain in all of history.

• 0:08Michael Stevens?

  The biggest villain?

• 0:15Hannah Fry?

  This episode is brought to you by Cancer Research UK.

• 0:18Michael Stevens?

  Here's something strange. Your DNA contains more ancient viral fragments than genes. The genes that build our cells make up only 2% of our DNA. And for years, that is what scientists focused on. They treated the rest, the ancient viruses and stuff, as junk.

• 0:39Hannah Fry?

  But now we know that that hidden majority, sometimes called the dark genome, influences how our biology works and how diseases like cancer behave.

• 0:49Michael Stevens?

  It's a reminder that progress rarely comes as a single breakthrough. It builds gradually. Cancer Research UK plays a central role in that progress, supporting decades of research into over 200 types of cancer, work that's helped double survival in the UK over the past 50 years.

• 1:08Hannah Fry?

  For more information about Cancer Research UK, their research breakthroughs, and how you can support them, visit cancerresearchuk.org/the rest is science.

• 1:20Speaker 02

  Hi, this is Gary Lineker from Goalhangers, The Rest Is Football. This episode is brought to you by Wise. It's only when you start moving money between currencies that you really think about the exchange rate, the fee, and what might be hidden away in the small print. Whether you're living abroad, paying someone overseas, or just trying to manage your money across borders, you want a fair exchange rate, an easy transfer, and no surprises along the way. Wise keeps things simple. Wise is a smart way to move the currencies you need around the globe. It works in more than 160 countries and with over 40 currencies. Most transfers arrive instantly. Wise uses the mid-market exchange rate, like the one you see on Google, with no markups or hidden fees.

• 2:04Speaker 02

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• 2:17Speaker 03

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• 2:59Speaker 03

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• 3:40Speaker 03

  Call 1-800-545-5979, or visit zepbound.lily.com.

• 3:53Michael Stevens?

  I'm gonna choose to interpret this incorrectly.

• 3:57Michael Stevens?

  Do you know, and I'm gonna say the answer is Wat Tyler, the leader of the 1381 peasants revolt.

• 4:02Hannah Fry?

  Okay.

• 4:03Michael Stevens?

  He marched the peasants from Canterbury to London, demanding economic reforms, the end of the poll tax, and he was killed and didn't really achieve a whole lot. Doesn't sound like a bad guy, though, does he?

• 4:13Hannah Fry?

  No, no.

• 4:14Michael Stevens?

  Well, villain didn't used to mean bad guy. It used to mean low-born peasant rustic.

• 4:20Hannah Fry?

  Did it?

• 4:20Michael Stevens?

  And then, because of the classes, right? It becomes, ooh, are you poor, or just bad? Same thing. Ha ha. So villain became a bad person.

• 4:31Hannah Fry?

  Wow.

• 4:32Michael Stevens?

  Yeah, an antagonist.

• 4:33Hannah Fry?

  In a lot of ways, though, you could say, you could argue that Wat Tyler was actually responsible for quite a few people's deaths, because if he had kept his little mouth shut and not done all that marching... Far few people would have died, you know?

• 4:47Michael Stevens?

  Spoken like a true.

• 4:48Hannah Fry?

  British person.

• 4:50Michael Stevens?

  A true British person. Basically, uh, yeah, I mean, look, he's literally a villain in the original sense. He was a peasant, but yet he had a very important role to play. And he's one of the very few peasants that we individually know from history. If you mean villain who was like an actual like bad person.

• 5:07Hannah Fry?

  Yeah, it's always guys.

• 5:09Michael Stevens?

  I'm going to mention only ones that aren't alive anymore because I it'll get too political. But I'll say Dick Cheney.

• 5:15Hannah Fry?

  Right.

• 5:15Michael Stevens?

  I also think Spiro Agnew.

• 5:17Hannah Fry?

  Okay.

• 5:18Michael Stevens?

  That's a little bit of a curve ball one.

• 5:19Hannah Fry?

  I don't know that.

• 5:20Michael Stevens?

  That guy, especially later in life, he was Richard Nixon's first vice president. He had to resign because of corruption and Gerald Ford came in. But Agnew, especially later in life, I think he's very much responsible for where we are in America today. Look it up.

• 5:34Hannah Fry?

  You're, I think you're still thinking too small here. I mean, how many deaths really is Dick Cheney responsible for? Like maybe a million?

• 5:41Michael Stevens?

  Look at my coffee, only maybe a million? Yeah, let's think bigger.

• 5:45Hannah Fry?

  I need, I need bigger, I need bigger. I want like, you know, I want sort of grand scale, tens of millions.

• 5:53Michael Stevens?

  Geez.

• 5:54Hannah Fry?

  Is that fair? Yeah, I reckon that is fair. You know what? I reckon that's fair.

• 5:57Michael Stevens?

  Who are you talking about?

• 5:59Hannah Fry?

  I'm talking about an, a little German called Fritz Haber.

• 6:03Michael Stevens?

  Different German than a lot of us might have been thinking about.

• 6:05Hannah Fry?

  It was a different German, but I would say he still had a pretty seismic impact as a villain or as a great hero. Because I think that there's an argument that certainly in the scientific world, he is both the biggest villain and biggest hero that has ever existed.

• 6:22Michael Stevens?

  Wow.

• 6:23Hannah Fry?

  That is what we're going to talk about today.

• 6:24Michael Stevens?

  We're going to get angry letters from Agnew fans. Did you know that Spiro Agnew is, uh, you can rearrange the letters in Spiro Agnew to spell grow a penis?

• 6:38Hannah Fry?

  I like to think that's the reason why he was named that. Because, I mean, Spiro is not on the top of any of those baby name books, is it?

• 6:44Michael Stevens?

  It, it actually isn't.

• 6:46Hannah Fry?

  No, I reckon his dad was like, hmm, okay, let's, uh, let's see, we've got S P I R O. What can we do?

• 6:54Michael Stevens?

  Or stop right there, Spiro, that's good.

• 6:56Hannah Fry?

  Done.

• 6:57Michael Stevens?

  And keep that anagram in the podcast, I dare you.

• 7:01Hannah Fry?

  Hey, we don't, we don't abide by rules. We can say the word penis if we want to, I reckon. Talking about someone who was an absolute penis, Fritz Haber, or was he? So the biggest contribution that this guy made, okay, this is a scientist, a chemist, German, um, German chemist. And a lot of his work, his big, big, big advances were all about nitrogen. Okay, now nitrogen, I mean, how boring, like.

• 7:26Michael Stevens?

  Very important, though.

• 7:27Hannah Fry?

  Sure, incredibly important, all over the place, uh, in the air that we're breathing. Not that it really doesn't, I think it's sort of.

• 7:35Michael Stevens?

  Most of the air we breathe is nitrogen.

• 7:37Hannah Fry?

  Most of the air we're breathing is nitrogen, but it's also the structural spine of every single protein, every strand of DNA. It's, you know, in plants, it's one of the five basic things that they need in order to grow, right? You need, you need potassium, phosphorus, water, sunlight and nitrogen, incredibly important. So it's not just like abundant, it's also essential. The problem is, is that the air that we breathe, the nitrogen that's in there, it's in N2. It's like locked into this unbelievably tight bond that is really hard to break.

• 8:10Michael Stevens?

  So you can't just pull it out of the air and give it to your plants?

• 8:13Hannah Fry?

  No, you can't just pull it out of the air and give it to your plants. It's almost impossible to break this bond, by the way. So in history, the only way that this was, this, this bond was broken was by lightning bolts. Okay, that's how much energy you need to break this bond between N2. Or there's like a very particular bacteria that can do it, that, uh, you know, sits in the, the roots of certain plants. Okay, that's, that's it. You can't, to, to a, a large scale, you cannot make this stuff. You can't. Break these bonds. And that ended up this like chemical fortress, water, water everywhere, but not a drop to drink. Right. Nitrogen, nitrogen everywhere, but not a single molecule on its own in order to help plants.

• 8:58Michael Stevens?

  Do the chemistry the plants need to do inside themselves. Yeah.

• 9:01Hannah Fry?

  There was a point in history where this was like a really big deal, like a really, really, really big problem. So this is like 1800s in particular, the point where, you know, farming was getting more and more intensive. The population of the, of the earth was, was growing. But you can only turn over the soil so many times unless you put nitrogen back into it. Unless you put fertilizer, right? I mean, fertilizer is essentially nitrogen. That's, I mean, that's.

• 9:26Michael Stevens?

  That's what it's there for primarily. Yeah.

• 9:28Hannah Fry?

  That's literally what it's there for. And farmers were, you know, using soil, a, a particular field a few times, a few years in a row. And then the soil was dead. There was nothing you can, you could do to it. And so there is this point in history, a guy called Thomas Robert Malthus, who wrote this essay on the principle of population. And he was like, looking forward, we have got this massive problem coming, guys. Because human population grows, it sort of doubles, right? You have two parents, they have two kids, whatever, two, four, eight and so on. But, you know, you're constrained by the, the limits of the land. So people were genuinely terrified that there was going to be mass starvation

• 10:10Hannah Fry?

  across the entirety of, of the world unless this nitrogen problem was sorted.

• 10:16Michael Stevens?

  Was it?

• 10:17Hannah Fry?

  Right. Well, okay. But you know, do you know what they did before you could like make nitrogen? Do, do you know what they used to do?

• 10:25Michael Stevens?

  They would use like manure.

• 10:27Hannah Fry?

  Yeah, but like, not just, oh, it's fine. We'll just use a little bit of manure. There were like whole industries that were involved in scooping up all kinds of organic matter. Cause if the only nitrogen that's available is locked into biological material. Corpses, you know, poop, even human poop is like suddenly this, this liquid gold.

• 10:50Michael Stevens?

  Wait, is it not liquid gold anymore?

• 10:51Hannah Fry?

  I'm sorry to disappoint you.

• 10:53Michael Stevens?

  I've got to call my accountant. I've got way too much human poop. To not be worried.

• 11:00Hannah Fry?

  It's in your pinboard with all your beard hair.

• 11:01Michael Stevens?

  I didn't realize that Haber had done anything. Is it not valuable?

• 11:06Hannah Fry?

  Not anymore. In Japan, by the way, okay, so this was like a process that people had perfected over, over many, many centuries of farming. But in Japan, landlords, they didn't just rent out apartments. They legally owned the lucrative rights to their tenants' waste.

• 11:20Michael Stevens?

  Nice.

• 11:21Hannah Fry?

  And, you know, also, by the way, the price of the fertilizer.

• 11:24Michael Stevens?

  Yeah.

• 11:24Hannah Fry?

  Would fluctuate depending on the social class of the people who pooped it.

• 11:27Michael Stevens?

  Oh, no kidding? Really? Did it really make a difference?

• 11:30Hannah Fry?

  Yes, because the rigid people had broader, more varied diets.

• 11:34Michael Stevens?

  Right.

• 11:34Hannah Fry?

  So there was more phosphorus in the food that they were eating, more nitrogen, more phosphorus. They were eating fresher foods.

• 11:40Michael Stevens?

  Right.

• 11:40Hannah Fry?

  So, but also in Britain, there, there was this massive industry going, going on by people called gong farmers.

• 11:50Michael Stevens?

  Uh huh.

• 11:51Hannah Fry?

  Which essentially meant going into, I mean, this is disgusting, right? But like overflowing cesspits in the city and then like carting all of the sludge.

• 12:01Michael Stevens?

  Right.

• 12:02Hannah Fry?

  Out. You have to be careful, by the way, if you are using human poop. You have to burn it to get rid of the, you know, a lot of the bacteria that's hiding inside of it.

• 12:12Michael Stevens?

  Oh, do, okay, I need to call my accountant and my poop monger because I, I've got, I've made some mistakes.

• 12:20Hannah Fry?

  Well, you just be careful because one of those mistakes could be cholera, right? Like a lot of the outbreaks of cholera.

• 12:25Michael Stevens?

  Explains a lot.

• 12:25Hannah Fry?

  In European cities.

• 12:26Michael Stevens?

  Okay, so you gotta burn it.

• 12:28Hannah Fry?

  Yeah.

• 12:29Michael Stevens?

  And that makes it a little bit healthier.

• 12:31Hannah Fry?

  Yes, exactly. And then you can put it on.

• 12:33Michael Stevens?

  Put it on the field.

• 12:34Hannah Fry?

  Then you can put it on the fields.

• 12:35Michael Stevens?

  Okay.

• 12:36Hannah Fry?

  And the other option, less stinky, definitely not less gross, was bones.

• 12:41Michael Stevens?

  Oh.

• 12:42Hannah Fry?

  So you can, there's like residual nitrogen in, in human bones.

• 12:46Michael Stevens?

  You grind them up?

• 12:47Hannah Fry?

  Yeah.

• 12:48Michael Stevens?

  Yeah.

• 12:48Hannah Fry?

  And then spray them. So in the 1820s, the Brits were like, we know where there's loads of bones. There was this big old battle in Waterloo, you know, not very long ago. In Leipzig, all of these places, they would go over. To these countries, dig up these battlefields, grab all the bones, grind them up and then spray them on the fields.

• 13:07Michael Stevens?

  Just to grow more crops.

• 13:09Hannah Fry?

  This is, this I can think demonstrates the desperation that there was.

• 13:12Michael Stevens?

  That we were reaching a point where the planet was like, there's a limit to what my chemical reactions are going to make possible.

• 13:19Hannah Fry?

  Yeah, we cannot physically sustain the population size that we are at because there is not enough nitrogen molecules floating around to make the human bodies, to make the food to feed the human bodies. I mean, the other sort of wild, wild source of nitrogen that would, would occur would be in bird poop. Specifically off the coast of Peru, there's this like little cluster of islands where, because it doesn't really rain and there's this cold current to the west that sort of creates this, this, this area of like absolute kind of arid air so that the droppings don't waste away, don't wash away.

• 13:58Michael Stevens?

  They don't wash away, right.

• 13:59Hannah Fry?

  Right, they just accumulate over, I mean, millennia.

• 14:03Michael Stevens?

  Wow, and they, so they don't, they don't like rot because it's just too dry for microbial life to.

• 14:07Hannah Fry?

  So you have just basically got this mountain of bird poop.

• 14:10Michael Stevens?

  Nice.

• 14:10Hannah Fry?

  That you can dig into. And the Incas, they knew about all of this. They were really careful. So they had it as this capital offense to, to kill any of the birds, to, to disturb any of the birds. And they had these really strict rules about how you would dish out this bird poop to different, different farmers. But as soon as the Spanish got involved.

• 14:28Michael Stevens?

  Right.

• 14:28Hannah Fry?

  Right. Found all of this stuff. They're like, whoopee. Liquid gold all over the place. Thank you very much. And there are, I mean, countless battles, you know, fights in naval fights for essentially this fertilizer. This, by the way, is part of the reason why Americas have got Midway Atoll, Baker Island and Howland Island, right?

• 14:50Michael Stevens?

  Really?

• 14:50Hannah Fry?

  Which are part of its Pacific naval empire. It has those because they had bird poop on them.

• 14:56Michael Stevens?

  I did not know that.

• 14:57Hannah Fry?

  Right. That was it. They were looking for poop.

• 14:59Michael Stevens?

  Wow.

• 15:01Hannah Fry?

  Isn't that extraordinary?

• 15:02Michael Stevens?

  Well, yeah.

• 15:03Hannah Fry?

  There's this whole massive war that happened, the War of the Pacific, between Bolivia and Chile, because Bolivia decided that they were going to impose, see if this resonates, a 10% tariff on any exports of bird poop. At which point Chile was like, no, thank you very much, and invaded. And as a result, Bolivia lost its entire coastline. And sort of there's still this ongoing fight about.

• 15:25Michael Stevens?

  Jeez, wow.

• 15:26Hannah Fry?

  You know, this is a lot of stuff, right?

• 15:28Michael Stevens?

  So, yeah, when you're at the beach and a seagull poops on you, you should be like, dude, countries used to be invaded for this stuff. People lost their lives for this stuff.

• 15:38Hannah Fry?

  People lost their lives.

• 15:39Michael Stevens?

  And I just got some for free.

• 15:40Hannah Fry?

  Yeah, well, don't people say it's lucky to have a bird poo on you?

• 15:43Michael Stevens?

  That should be why.

• 15:44Hannah Fry?

  I, that is, hey, £5.50.

• 15:47Michael Stevens?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 15:49Hannah Fry?

  Yeah, I can eat tomorrow.

• 15:50Michael Stevens?

  No, but this is, this is really, really significant, that we had reached a point where to keep the human population thriving and growing was impossible.

• 16:02Hannah Fry?

  Mm hmm.

• 16:03Michael Stevens?

  Like, a, a, a, any other species would have just reached that ceiling and died off.

• 16:09Hannah Fry?

  Yeah.

• 16:09Michael Stevens?

  Um, down to a smaller population. But humans, as our story goes, always find a way.

• 16:16Hannah Fry?

  Always find a way.

• 16:17Michael Stevens?

  Always find a way.

• 16:19Hannah Fry?

  Yeah, and part of the reason why we found a way is because we knew that there was nitrogen literally everywhere. Like, you can't, you know, most of the thing, breathe in loads of nitrogen, breathe in loads of nitrogen. You're, you're so literally surrounded by this stuff.

• 16:34Michael Stevens?

  And we, as a species, found a way to bend the earth to our will and to say, give it up.

• 16:41Hannah Fry?

  Yeah, and not just we as a species. The villain slash hero of our story, Fritz Haber, was the person who managed to do this.

• 16:48Michael Stevens?

  And how did he do it?

• 16:49Hannah Fry?

  Okay, so, so the, the thing is, right, this, you've got this really strong chemical bond, right? This is 1900s, incidentally, he is German. He's, he's Jewish, actually, as well. He's a, he's a German Jew. He's incredibly patriotic. He sort of sees the, the, the, the breaking of the nitrogen bond into making ammonia, incidentally. You break the nitrogen, you have N two, you break it and you swap in two hydrogen molecules instead to make NH two, which is ammonia.

• 17:18Michael Stevens?

  Oh, really? Okay. So hold on. How do you do this? Do you need a lot of energy?

• 17:22Hannah Fry?

  Oh, you need so much energy.

• 17:23Michael Stevens?

  Okay.

• 17:23Hannah Fry?

  But it's also, there's also this like strangeness to it because, I mean, you need to basically heat it up to like a thousand degrees.

• 17:31Michael Stevens?

  Geez, yeah.

• 17:32Hannah Fry?

  To give you enough energy in order to be able to do it. But the problem is because once you break it, once you heat it up to that, that heat, as soon then as you've got, you've got NH two and you've got another NH two here, it's being vibrated so violently that it just immediately splits back into N two.

• 17:49Michael Stevens?

  Oh, wow.

• 17:50Hannah Fry?

  So you can get it, but it's, it's just not stable at all. It just disappears in a second. People who are real, you know, uh, Nurse, who was the father of the third law of thermodynamics, right? They, they were like, it's just not possible because it's an exothermic reaction. You know, it's just that you, you can't do it. But what Fritz Haber realized was that um, you could trick it. You could trick these molecules because if instead of just heating it up, you could also, because ammonia with the H.

• 18:20Michael Stevens?

  Two H's instead of a nitrogen atom.

• 18:22Hannah Fry?

  Is smaller.

• 18:23Michael Stevens?

  Right.

• 18:24Hannah Fry?

  Then it's much more stable under high pressure.

• 18:26Michael Stevens?

  Oh.

• 18:27Hannah Fry?

  So if you put it under, under high pressure, also if you add in some metallic catalysts to just make things go a little bit faster, you actually only need to heat it up to about five hundred degrees.

• 18:36Michael Stevens?

  Okay.

• 18:36Hannah Fry?

  And then if you take the ammonia away as it's created.

• 18:39Michael Stevens?

  It's stable.

• 18:40Hannah Fry?

  It's stable. You can just like leak off all of this ammonia. And then if you get the ammonia back down to a sensible temperature, then you're away, like you're completely fine.

• 18:49Michael Stevens?

  And ammonia, what's the deal? It's good because it's got nitrogen in it that's more readily available to chemical processes.

• 18:55Hannah Fry?

  Yep, exactly. It's this nitrogen that's got these two hydrogen atoms next to it. That bond isn't, is, is not as fussy, not as fussy about being broken. So you can spray that on the earth and then, and then off you go. You're absolutely fine. I mean, people say that they can smell ammonia when they like, when they smell urine.

• 19:11Michael Stevens?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 19:11Hannah Fry?

  I mean, that's what you're smelling.

• 19:12Michael Stevens?

  Right. Okay, okay.

• 19:14Hannah Fry?

  There was another German Bosch who worked out how to put this into an actual manufacturing process.

• 19:20Michael Stevens?

  Okay.

• 19:21Hannah Fry?

  You have to be really careful, by the way, because you've got, you've got like, it's like unbelievably high pressure and unbelievably high temperatures, prone to exploding.

• 19:28Michael Stevens?

  Right.

• 19:29Hannah Fry?

  Which ha, which did happen. In quite significant ways in the early days of this. I mean, one of the worst disasters in like industrial history was in the Opau site. This is in nineteen twenty one.

• 19:44Hannah Fry?

  This is eight years after the ammonia synthesis plant was first put into operation.

• 19:49Michael Stevens?

  Was this in Germany?

• 19:49Hannah Fry?

  In.

• 19:50Michael Stevens?

  Modern day Germany.

• 19:51Hannah Fry?

  I guess Opau, I think so. I think it was, yeah. And they had, they were making fertilizer. This massive explosion in a silo ended up hurting about two thousand people.

• 20:06Michael Stevens?

  Jeez.

• 20:07Hannah Fry?

  Killing five hundred of them.

• 20:09Michael Stevens?

  Cali.

• 20:09Hannah Fry?

  Right, loads of severe injuries. I mean, really, really, you have to be. It's really difficult to do this daily. I mean, we can do it now. We know how to do it now. Bosch, the guy who like worked out how to make this process, he was at the memorial service. Held at Ludwigshafen. So yes, I think that was in Germany.

• 20:28Michael Stevens?

  Sounds German, yeah.

• 20:28Hannah Fry?

  Sounds German, doesn't it? And he said, the very material needed to provide nourishment and sustain millions in our fatherland. And the very same that we have been producing and shipping for years has suddenly proven a grim enemy. For reasons we do not yet comprehend. And I think in that is this hint, right, of of both sides of the coin of this of this single scientific advancement, because it is no exaggeration to say that the explosion of the population that we have seen in the nineteen hundreds is almost single-handedly down to the discovery by Fritz Haber, right?

• 21:08Hannah Fry?

  Without artificial fertilizer, we simply would not be able to sustain a population like this.

• 21:15Michael Stevens?

  That's right. And you know what? That that quote from him is also foreshadowing like every scientific innovation. You could say that same thing about nuclear energy.

• 21:26Hannah Fry?

  Right.

• 21:26Michael Stevens?

  Nuclear weapons. You could say the same thing about AI even, right? Like, well, it's going to really save us and it could also explode on us.

• 21:35Hannah Fry?

  Totally, totally. So this is, I think, one of the reasons why Fritz Haber is like, I mean, genuinely responsible directly for the existence of billions of people.

• 21:47Michael Stevens?

  Of billions of people, which, yeah, I think I'd also throw in Borlog there too for Dorf wheat, I believe. But like these agricultural.

• 21:56Hannah Fry?

  Go on, what's that?

• 21:57Michael Stevens?

  I don't know exactly, but there's like a kind of, like, they couldn't grow wheat in like India.

• 22:02Hannah Fry?

  Right.

• 22:02Michael Stevens?

  Because of some reason. And he genetically engineered wheat to grow that could thrive. It was much more resilient against pests and whatever. And so we were able to feed a lot more people. But you need fertilizer. So if you've just got the dwarf wheat, but no fertilizer, you have nothing.

• 22:20Hannah Fry?

  Yeah.

• 22:20Michael Stevens?

  So, so yeah, Haber or Ha- how are you pronouncing it?

• 22:24Hannah Fry?

  Haber.

• 22:25Michael Stevens?

  Haber.

• 22:27Hannah Fry?

  I like, whenever I do a German accent in my head, or a German word in my head, I like to sort of imagine a quite camp German man.

• 22:33Michael Stevens?

  Okay.

• 22:34Hannah Fry?

  I'm doing it, you know, so sort of like Haber.

• 22:36Michael Stevens?

  Haber. So Haber really-

• 22:39Hannah Fry?

  Suddenly a thousand times better.

• 22:41Michael Stevens?

  Really? Yeah, it works. He really changed the game in a way that is like so uniquely human. To just quickly make the world different. Rather than adapt to our environment, we're going to adapt the environment right now to our will.

• 22:57Hannah Fry?

  Yeah, yeah, exactly.

• 22:58Michael Stevens?

  And because of that, we could have billions of more people. I mean, I, I've, I've looked into this. I was wondering if maybe, if we aren't so human centric, Colonel Sanders saved even more lives.

• 23:12Hannah Fry?

  In the sense that lots and lots of chickens exist as a result of him.

• 23:15Michael Stevens?

  So many more chickens have been born because of the appetite he encouraged in us for the animal. And this, it's a very weird ethical question. Like, well, you know, uh, because there's like 30 billion chickens on this planet, more than there are people, which makes sense when you imagine how much of a chicken a person eats just in one week.

• 23:33Hannah Fry?

  Yeah.

• 23:33Michael Stevens?

  You know, anyway, those 30 billion chicken that are alive right now, and there's going to be 30 billion more next year, like, they owe whatever life they get to enjoy, which hopefully is some of it, to the fact that we have such a hunger for their flesh.

• 23:50Hannah Fry?

  Is Colonel Sanders solely responsible for that? How much did he? I mean, sure, it is finger licking good. I agree. There's no doubt in my mind about that. But how much of our appetite for chicken is down to him?

• 24:05Michael Stevens?

  That's a very good question. And I'm going to say that it's like the majority of it because it's huge in Asia.

• 24:12Hannah Fry?

  Right.

• 24:13Michael Stevens?

  I mean, it's like Christmas tradition in China, I believe.

• 24:16Hannah Fry?

  Yeah.

• 24:16Michael Stevens?

  Or Japan. Anyway, I don't want to pin it all on him. There's a lot of other people who played a role in our desire for meat from animals. And so we breed a lot more of them. And suddenly they have a lot more. There's a lot more of them. Does that count as saving a life? But I think, I think Hopper did the same thing by not just saving lives, but also making lives possible in the first place.

• 24:39Hannah Fry?

  Exactly.

• 24:40Michael Stevens?

  And one thing I struggled with is what's a word for that? You haven't saved someone from dying or from starving, but you have allowed someone's life to even begin.

• 24:52Hannah Fry?

  Yeah, right.

• 24:53Michael Stevens?

  It's like a pre-save.

• 24:54Hannah Fry?

  A pre-save. Yeah, it is. It is like a pre-save. Or not even, I don't know whether save. It's like you've created the conditions for their existence to be possible.

• 25:04Michael Stevens?

  Yeah, you know what? I'm going to look this up because I did find an answer. Or actually, my friend Anna helped me.

• 25:09Hannah Fry?

  While you're doing that, can I just point everyone to the fact that when you look at Colonel Sanders on a KFC sign, it sort of looks like he's wearing a necktie. But if you squint at it and look at it a different way, it looks like he's just got a massive head and a really tiny body.

• 25:21Michael Stevens?

  Yes, a little stick body. What I love is that my daughter noticed that before I told her. She saw Colonel Sanders' head with the little bow tie. And she goes, why is his body so small? And I'm like, oh.

• 25:37Hannah Fry?

  Thank you.

• 25:37Michael Stevens?

  That was a meme like 20 years ago. And you've just discovered it on your own.

• 25:42Hannah Fry?

  She's re-memes.

• 25:44Michael Stevens?

  A friend of mine, shout out to Anna McCauley, she came up with a word for saving a life by making it possible, by enabling its conception and birth. And it was provenient saving. Anticipatory, like we're getting, we're getting everything ready for you to exist. You aren't already alive, you aren't about to die and we're gonna cure you. You're just like possible because of this action. I'm saving your life, I'm prevening it.

• 26:14Hannah Fry?

  Prevening it, I like that a lot.

• 26:17Michael Stevens?

  Yeah, and so, and so, Haber did a lot to save existing lives and previne future lives. So, almost the majority of humans alive today are here because of him.

• 26:29Hannah Fry?

  Yeah, so actually, there's, there's some calculations that have been run. Which says that 50% of the nitrogen molecules in your body right now came about as a direct result of someone doing the Haber-Bosch process somewhere.

• 26:43Michael Stevens?

  My goodness, talk about changing the world.

• 26:45Hannah Fry?

  Right, which half do you wanna give back? You're only here.

• 26:49Michael Stevens?

  None of it, I like, I like these nitrogen atoms I have at the moment.

• 26:53Hannah Fry?

  I like them all. Okay, so if that's the good side of what he did, that's his kind of heroics.

• 26:57Michael Stevens?

  Yeah, how does he undo this goodness?

• 26:59Hannah Fry?

  How does he undo this? So, you know, prevened billions of people responsible for the deaths of tens, maybe hundreds of millions. Okay, well, before I get to that, let me just also paint a bit more of the story of what's going on here. The First World War, really it was the first war that involved science and technology on this big scale. You know, where scientists hadn't really played a big role in, in war up until this point. And it turns out that Haber was very excited about the fact that this exact same process of, of breaking this nitrogen bond could, with small modifications, fix nitrogen so you could make explosives.

• 27:39Michael Stevens?

  Ah.

• 27:40Hannah Fry?

  Mm-hmm, yeah, okay. Nitrates is essentially what we're talking about here, which is absolutely essential for gunpowder, it's essential for shells. That they, it is, they are nitrogen compounds. Before the Haber-Bosch process, Germany's supply of, of nitrates for, for munitions, they, they had to get these imports over from Chile, but they, they only had enough of these explosives to fight for another six months in the trenches of, of the First World War. And then, when the British Navy- Blockaded Germany in nineteen fourteen to cut off those supplies. The expectation was that Germany, the war was going to finish.

• 28:13Michael Stevens?

  No more explosives.

• 28:14Hannah Fry?

  They've got, what are you going to do? You can't fight a war when you don't have any explosives. And so Harbour was like, okay, great. Let's just make loads of this stuff. Like, let's get on it. Let's, you know, we, let's make absolutely loads and loads and loads of it. By the end of the war, you know, he, he had furnished Germany with, uh, half of their explosives came from, from, uh,

• 28:36Michael Stevens?

  The process.

• 28:36Hannah Fry?

  Chemistry, essentially.

• 28:37Michael Stevens?

  Yeah.

• 28:38Hannah Fry?

  So, you know, without this, without this, Germany probably would have lost the war way, way, way quicker.

• 28:45Michael Stevens?

  Sooner.

• 28:45Hannah Fry?

  Way quicker. And at least seven million lives would have been saved, okay?

• 28:50Michael Stevens?

  But there's more, isn't there?

• 28:51Hannah Fry?

  There's more because that's not even including all the people who were killed by the, the nitrates themselves.

• 28:57Michael Stevens?

  During World War One.

• 28:58Hannah Fry?

  During World War One or afterwards. Because nitrates still form an extremely important part of explosives.

• 29:04Michael Stevens?

  Yep.

• 29:04Hannah Fry?

  And it's really difficult to put a number on this, but the number of people who've been killed by explosives involving nitrates that directly link back to this, this kind of process is in the tens to hundreds of millions of people. Plus, then if you add on the fact that if Germany, if the, the First World War hadn't gone on as long, Germany hadn't dug in as deep, the Treaty of Versailles wouldn't have been as.

• 29:26Michael Stevens?

  As, as perceived as painful by them, leading to certain political decisions and a right.

• 29:32Hannah Fry?

  And so on, and so on, and so on.

• 29:33Michael Stevens?

  Goodness.

• 29:33Hannah Fry?

  We're talking, we're talking lots and lots of people. Now, okay, I think you could argue, right? In a certain sense, all of this is a little bit incidental, unintended consequences, sort of, you know, butterfly effect of the things that he was doing. So just so you don't feel too bad about Fritz Haber, I also want to tell you about the other chemistry work that he was doing at the time, because this is like where stuff gets proper nasty, because he is also essentially the father of chemical warfare.

• 30:03Michael Stevens?

  Really?

• 30:04Hannah Fry?

  And we're going to be talking about that after the break.

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• 31:07Hannah Fry?

  He really went in hard.

• 31:11Michael Stevens?

  And because he was patriotic. This for him was a duty. It was good.

• 31:16Hannah Fry?

  He could not understand how people didn't understand the value of Germany and it's, you know, the fatherland and so on. He wanted to do everything he possibly could in order to make sure that Germany won this war. I should also say before he... So essentially, the chemical weapons that were used during the First World War were also as a direct result of Harvard. He was the one who was pushing for all of this and doing the chemistry.

• 31:42Michael Stevens?

  What sorts of chemical weapons?

• 31:44Hannah Fry?

  We are talking about chlorine gas here, as well, you know, nitrate as well, mustard gas. I mean, there's a few of them that he was directly responsible... I'll come to those in a second. But I just want to say before this, before this even happened, before the First World War even happened, chemical weapons were banned. There was a ban on chemical weapons before all of this. European powers said they'd signed all these treaties that were against poisoning or poisoned weapons, projectiles whose sole purpose was to deliver asphyxiating...

• 32:11Michael Stevens?

  And deleterious.

• 32:12Hannah Fry?

  And deleterious gases, right?

• 32:14Michael Stevens?

  Yeah.

• 32:15Hannah Fry?

  Thank you.

• 32:15Michael Stevens?

  I'm up to date on my history of poisonous warfare.

• 32:21Hannah Fry?

  And I'm not up to date on my pronunciation of difficult words. Anyway, but he argued, he argued, actually, it was fine for Germany to do all of this because the treaty only banned artillery shells.

• 32:33Michael Stevens?

  And what did they use?

• 32:34Hannah Fry?

  And actually, if you just bury big canisters.

• 32:38Michael Stevens?

  Oh, brother.

• 32:39Hannah Fry?

  Of chlorine gas in the ground near the trenches. Well, you're not using an artillery shell then, are you?

• 32:45Michael Stevens?

  A little bit of a loophole.

• 32:46Hannah Fry?

  So this is, this is what happened, right? In, in particular, in Ypres in nineteen fifteen. And it's by anybody who was, who witnessed it or witnessed the aftermath of it, of it. It really, it's kind of chilling. The way that people lost their lives as a direct result of, of Harbour's chemistry. So under his direction, they, they secretly buried six thousand pressurized canisters of liquid chlorine along a one and a half mile stretch. This is just like near the front line. They waited for weeks and weeks and weeks for the wind to be blowing in exactly the right direction. And then the Germans, they, when the wind shifted, they opened fire on, opened fire,

• 33:30Hannah Fry?

  or maybe they opened the valves, actually, whatever. They, they released this gas essentially so it would blow over the trenches where all of the, the French and the Allies were. And it was this like creeping green cloud. I mean, just, just no way to escape it. No one had any gas masks. It was, men were like blinded, they were kind of choking, they were coughing up blood, they're coughing up green foam. And just within a really short period of time, across this entire four mile gap, every living creature essentially drowned on dry land.

• 34:07Michael Stevens?

  Jeez.

• 34:07Hannah Fry?

  Like really, really horrific. Even Hitler wasn't interested in chemical warfare on the battlefield.

• 34:13Michael Stevens?

  Oh, so wow. Even Hitler is like, dude, you've gone too far. Jeez.

• 34:19Hannah Fry?

  You would think that seeing that level of devastation, I think it would, in most of us, if we were responsible for it, well, I can't imagine ever being in that position, but I think it would make us think twice about it. But Fritz Haber really doubled down.

• 34:37Michael Stevens?

  Well, yeah, and he thinks. In his patriotism, that his end is good, that any means are justified by the ends. But Haber, look, all we have is means, dude.

• 34:52Hannah Fry?

  Yeah.

• 34:53Michael Stevens?

  And let's just do a little tally here. I know you're not even done.

• 34:57Hannah Fry?

  Wait, let me just tell you about his wife really quickly before we do this.

• 34:59Michael Stevens?

  Oh, okay.

• 35:00Hannah Fry?

  Because, you know, as soon as this happened, he heads back to Germany in celebration. And his wife, who was also a chemist, a really intellectually gifted chemist, she was like, this is despicable.

• 35:14Michael Stevens?

  She's reacting to what happened at Ibra.

• 35:16Hannah Fry?

  Yeah. She's like, this is the worst. This is just a perversion of the ideals of science. She really dislikes it. Haber's like, well, look, what you're saying amounts to treason. You're not, how can you possibly think that? And so why he celebrated his promotion to captain, she took her own life because she just couldn't handle the horror of what had happened.

• 35:37Michael Stevens?

  Jeez.

• 35:38Hannah Fry?

  Right. Even after his wife's death, he gets straight back at it. He's looking at mustard gas. He's looking at phosphine. He sets up this lab to try and work out cyanide-based pesticides, one of which ends up becoming Cyclone B, which, I mean, very tragically, is then the poison that is used to murder six million Jews. And Haber, by the way, is a German Jew.

• 36:08Michael Stevens?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 36:09Hannah Fry?

  I mean, it's really extraordinary, the level of, well, I don't even have a word for it.

• 36:16Michael Stevens?

  Well, it's like humanity and inhumanity.

• 36:19Hannah Fry?

  Mm hmm.

• 36:20Michael Stevens?

  This guy, okay, I'm gonna be God now.

• 36:22Hannah Fry?

  Okay.

• 36:23Michael Stevens?

  I'm gonna be doing the whole, like, let's add up.

• 36:26Hannah Fry?

  Do a tally.

• 36:26Michael Stevens?

  Your goods and bads. All right. So if you start off strong, you develop a way of artificially making fertilizers that allows billions of people to experience consciousness and life on Earth. You save and pervade billions. Then you use that same technology to make explosives that will wind up killing, to date, 100 million people.

• 36:56Michael Stevens?

  And you introduce chemical weapons that prolong a war that lead to a consequence, which if you look at it the right way, leads to certain political changes in Germany that lead to another world war. And you introduce the leader of Germany at that time to chemical weapons that at first he's not really into. And then suddenly he is, and he starts to use one that you've created.

• 37:22Hannah Fry?

  So he didn't create it. His institution that he created and set up the research in, they created it.

• 37:27Michael Stevens?

  Okay, so you get a half point for that one, a negative half point for that one. You, you wind up being somewhat responsible indirectly for the creation of the exact chemical used to genocide millions of people. So you've completely changed our relationship to ourselves, what it means to fight, to be in a war, what is the value of a human. You've given us tools to destroy life that go above and beyond what was even natural. Just say that.

• 37:58Hannah Fry?

  Yeah. But I have a, I have a question though, God, if I may.

• 38:04Michael Stevens?

  You have, you have one question.

• 38:05Hannah Fry?

  Mr. God.

• 38:07Michael Stevens?

  Doctor God, actually. I didn't spend 10 years working on that thesis to be called Mr. God.

• 38:16Hannah Fry?

  I wonder whether there was an inevitability to some of this anyway.

• 38:20Michael Stevens?

  What do you mean?

• 38:21Hannah Fry?

  The splitting of nitrogen, which is the direct chemical process that made almost everything that you've described possible. I think it was an open door that he just happened to be the one that pushed at, you know? How long would it have been before somebody else managed to do it?

• 38:39Michael Stevens?

  Right, so what Bosch said about that door that had been opened to save so many lives has now become a villain. He was discussing a factory explosion.

• 38:51Hannah Fry?

  Right.

• 38:51Michael Stevens?

  But he may as well have been discussing what else was down that hall. Once you split open the nitrogen, the N2 molecule, you went in, you could make fertilizers and you can also make bombs, chemical weapons and change our whole paradigm of cruelty.

• 39:07Hannah Fry?

  Yeah, and I think I do, I don't know, I change my mind on this quite often. But I think how I feel about it today is that I think that there is an inevitability to scientific advancements being used for things that make us feel really uncomfortable. And I think that actually you sort of need really horrible things in order for the world to say, okay, no, absolutely not. Because after what happened at Reap, there are really, in the Geneva Convention, there are really, really, really strong rules about using weapons like that and others on civilians, on, on, in warfare, full stop.

• 39:48Hannah Fry?

  I, I, I think sometimes you kind of need the bad for the good to come, come to the, to the fore.

• 39:56Michael Stevens?

  Right, that from the trauma, growth can happen.

• 39:59Hannah Fry?

  Hmm.

• 40:00Michael Stevens?

  And it's a terrible roller coaster ride.

• 40:02Hannah Fry?

  Hmm.

• 40:04Michael Stevens?

  But the roller coaster that Haber built was the tallest.

• 40:09Hannah Fry?

  It was the tallest.

• 40:10Michael Stevens?

  It was the fastest.

• 40:12Hannah Fry?

  Hmm. Yeah, I'm glad you didn't ruin that quite profound sentence by doing the German accent.

• 40:20Michael Stevens?

  I know, I have given it up.

• 40:22Hannah Fry?

  I should tell you about what happened at the end of his life, by the way.

• 40:24Michael Stevens?

  Okay, yeah.

• 40:25Hannah Fry?

  Look, I've, I've left these little, little clues along the way. He's a German Jew, right? He renounced Judaism, but he is around, he was one of the most prominent figures in the First World War for Germany. And yet, when the Nazis came in, it didn't matter to them that he had renounced Judaism. It didn't matter to them, you know, any, any of what he had done for Germany up until that point. They didn't fire him immediately from his position, but they demanded that he dismiss all of the Jewish scientists that were working underneath him. And as a result, he, he fled to England. He took a position at Cambridge University. But his time in exile, he's with the British, right? He was also in the trenches.

• 41:08Michael Stevens?

  Yeah.

• 41:08Hannah Fry?

  And he was miserable, understandably so, all of the British scientists, you know, lots of them who had literally been in the trenches and certainly lost friends. You know, to his poison gas clouds at Vipra. They refused to work with him, refused to be around him. Ernest Rutherford, who was the father of nuclear physics, refused to shake his hand when they both won a Nobel Prize, the Nobel Prize ceremony. And he died in 1934. He was stateless, exiled, abandoned by the country. He'd served, you know, served with everything that he had, really. I don't feel too sad about that.

• 41:43Michael Stevens?

  No, it's hard to.

• 41:44Hannah Fry?

  Hmm. I do think that there's a repeat of this kind of discussion, though, that is happening a bit now. Not to the extent of Harbour, as you say, his roller coaster was the tallest and the fastest. But this idea about the inevitability of scientific advancement and how technology and science is neither good nor evil. It's the way that you use it.

• 42:07Michael Stevens?

  Yeah, yeah, it's a thing. It's molecules, but then we weave them into a web. That's either a ladder of support or we find ourselves trapped.

• 42:17Hannah Fry?

  Do you think there's an inevitability to it?

• 42:21Michael Stevens?

  No, I don't think there's an inevitability to what consequence is good and bad.

• 42:27Hannah Fry?

  Or just the advances. If something is possible, if it were possible to split the atom, if it were possible to build a nuclear bomb, if it were possible to create chlorine gas, that inevitably somebody would try it.

• 42:39Michael Stevens?

  Oh, yes, yes. I think that scientific progress is inevitable, that we need to treat curiosity like gravity. Okay, it just is. And then what we need to do is both react to, but even better, prepare for the consequences. We certainly can't come in and say, you know, you've got to stop investigating this. You've got to stop being curious about this because of what could happen. But we do need to take on the responsibility and become even more curious to really think about what is it that we're doing? What will the future think about what we're doing?

• 43:16Hannah Fry?

  Yeah, I think that's a really good way to think of it, the ultimate cure. Is more curiosity.

• 43:23Michael Stevens?

  Exactly.

• 43:24Hannah Fry?

  Hmm.

• 43:24Michael Stevens?

  It's not stopping it. It's, oh, self-driving cars. How are they going to decide between hitting a grandma or a child? And it's like, well, you know, let's work on that.

• 43:33Hannah Fry?

  Mm hmm.

• 43:34Michael Stevens?

  But let's not stop the development of what could really help so many people.

• 43:38Hannah Fry?

  Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Well, we hope that we've helped you with this podcast.

• 43:43Michael Stevens?

  Yeah.

• 43:45Hannah Fry?

  It's sort of a bit of a depressing story, really. I sort of wanted to do a bit of a jolly happy clappy ending, but there isn't one.

• 43:50Michael Stevens?

  I think, but I think you're right. I think sometimes the depression is inspirational.

• 43:54Hannah Fry?

  Yeah.

• 43:55Michael Stevens?

  And so, yeah, stay curious, become more curious. And as always, you can reach out to us at [email protected]. We'd love to hear from you.

• 44:06Hannah Fry?

  Yeah, or leave us a comment wherever you are getting this podcast. And we'll see you next week.

• 44:10Michael Stevens?

  See ya.

• 44:24Speaker 03

  Here we are getting a statement from Number Ten. On that flight, with 350 passengers on board.

• 44:33Speaker 06

  The Great Game, strategic struggle between Britain and Russia.

• 44:40Speaker 07

  We assess, uh, Prime Minister, with high confidence it was Russian.

• 44:47Hannah Fry?

  Holding the Russians accountable is World War III. They took down a British passenger jet containing 350 people.

• 44:52Speaker 06

  Man in the Kremlin is playing, Alex. Got to ask yourself, you want to play or not?

• 44:58Speaker 02

  You're the Prime Minister. You've done nothing!

• 45:05Speaker 05

  We would need to understand the policy context. All the relevant context will be structured as a framework today, and disseminated into an operation order, or FRAGO.

• 45:16Speaker 05

  A FRAGO that says to kill the President of Russia.

• 45:21Speaker 02

  Yes.

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