Wednesday, January 29, 2020

Scientists behaving badly

There is a tendency in today's society to view scientists as secular priests in laboratory coats.  The actual story is that they are every bit as human as you or I:
Hertz served in the German army during WW I, in a special unit commanded by Fritz Haber that for the first time developed and deployed poison gas in warfare.  Pioneer Regiment 35/36 had no fewer than four future Nobel Prize winners in its ranks.  Franck and Hertz won the Physics prize in 1925.  Otto Hahn discovered nuclear fission and won the 1944 Nobel for chemistry despite carrying on his research in Berlin!  (To be fair it was only announced post war).  Fritz Haber topped them all.  He won the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1918.....at a time when the acrid stench of poison gas still lingered in the depths of shattered battlefields.
Haber is an interesting fellow: present on the battlefield when the first chlorine gas attack was launched in World War I, he remained proud of his work for the rest of his life.  On the positive part of the ledger he co-invented the Born-Haber Cycle of creating artificial nitrogen fertilizer from air.  It is thought that half the world's population owe their nutrition to him.

But the Nazis chased him out of Germany because he was Jewish, and some in the scientific community held a grudge for his war work.  Ernest Rutherford refused to shake his hand when they met.

Memento mori.

3 comments:

  1. How is working in the war industry of your nation "behaving badly"? Or did you mean Rutherford refusing to shake hands?

    ReplyDelete
  2. As the original source of this I can't say what our genial host had in mind with "behaving badly" but you can only give a guy so much slack. Haber continued to secretly work on poison gas development even after the war ended. By then everyone knew it for an evil, monsterous thing. Also, it's not as if nobody told him at the time that this was heinous...some accounts have it that his first wife shot herself with his service revolver in 1915 out of disgust for what her husband had become.

    I'd say that in this little morality play there were no heroes. Just really smart guys who did not think through the directions that their work could be bent by others.

    Behaving Cluelessly might be more apt.

    TW

    ReplyDelete
  3. Tim, that's a good summing up. Haber's Wikipedia article is (as so many biographies are) very sympathetic (especially about his later days) but there's no covering up the smell of something quite unpleasant.

    ReplyDelete

Remember your manners when you post. Anonymous comments are not allowed because of the plague of spam comments.