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- [00:00]
A
Welcome to the rest of science. I'm Hannah Frye.
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And I'm Michael Stevens.
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A
Okay, Michael, I want you to tell me who you think is the biggest villain in all of history.
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B
The biggest villain?
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A
Mmm. This episode is brought to you by Cancer Research uk.
- [00:19]
C
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.
- [00:39]
A
But now we know that that hidden majority, sometimes called the dark genome, influences how our biology works and how diseases like cancer behave.
- [00:49]
C
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.
- [01:09]
A
For more information about Cancer Research UK, their research breakthroughs, and how you can support them, visit cancerresearchuk.org thereestiscience.
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D
I sold my car in Carvana last night.
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A
Well, that's cool.
- [01:23]
D
No, you don't understand. It went perfectly. Real offer down to the penny. They're picking it up tomorrow. Nothing went wrong.
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A
So what's the problem?
- [01:31]
D
That is the problem. Nothing in my life goes as smoothly. I'm waiting for the catch.
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A
Maybe there's no catch.
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D
That's exactly what a catch would want me to think.
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A
Wow. You need to relax.
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D
I need to knock on wood. Do we have wood? Is this table wood?
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A
I think it's laminate.
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D
Okay. Yeah, that's good. That's close enough.
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A
Car selling without a catch.
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B
Sell your car today on Carvana.
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A
Pick up. Fees may apply.
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B
I'm gonna choose to interpret this incorrectly, do you know? And I'm gonna say the answer is, Wat Tyler, the leader of the 1381 peasants revolt.
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A
Okay?
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B
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?
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A
No.
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B
Well, villain didn't used to mean bad guy. It used to mean lowborn, peasant, rustic, did it? And then because of the classes, right, it becomes, ooh, are you poor or. Or just bad? Same thing. So villain became a bad person. Wow. Yeah.
- [02:35]
A
An antagonist 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. Cause if he had kept his little mouth shut and not done all that marching far, few people would have Died,
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B
you know, spoken like a true British person. A true British person, basically. 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 bad guy. Bad guy, yeah. It's always guys I'm gonna mention. Only ones that aren't alive anymore because it'll get too political. But I'll say Dick Cheney.
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A
Right.
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B
I also think Spiro Agnew. Okay, that's a little bit of a curve ball. 1 don't know that.
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A
Who's that?
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B
That guy, Especially later in life. He was Richard Nixon's. 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.
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A
I think you're still thinking too small here. I mean, how many deaths, really, is Dick Cheney responsible for? Like, maybe a million Come only.
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B
Maybe a million. Yeah. Let's think bigger.
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A
I need bigger. I need bigger. I want, like, you know, I want sort of grand scale, tens of millions.
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B
Jeez.
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A
Is that fair? Yeah, I reckon that is fair. You know what? I reckon that's fair.
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B
Who are you talking about?
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A
I'm talking about a little German called Fritz Haber.
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B
Different German than a lot of us might have been thinking about.
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A
He was a different German, but I would say he still had a pretty seismic impact. As a villain or as a great hero. What? 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. Wow. That is what we're gonna talk about today.
- [04:27]
B
We're gonna get angry letters from Agnew fans. Did you know that Spiro Agnew is. You can rearrange the letters in Spiro Agnew to spell grow a penis.
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A
I like to think that's the reason why he was named that. Cause, I mean, Spiro is not at the top of any of those baby name books.
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B
Is actually. Isn't.
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A
No. I reckon his dad was like, mm, okay, let's see. We got S, P, I, R, O. What can we do or.
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B
Stop right there, Spiro. That's good.
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A
Done.
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B
And keep that anagram in the podcast. I dare you.
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A
Hey, 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 chemistry, German, German chemist. And a lot of his work, his big, big, big advances were all about nitrogen. Okay, now nitrogen, I mean, how boring?
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B
Like, very important, though.
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A
Sure. Incredibly important. All over the place in the air that we're breathing. Not that it really doesn't. I think sort of most of the
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B
air we breathe is nitrogen, most of
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A
the air we're breathing is nitrogen. But it's also the structural spine of, 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.
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B
So you can't just pull it out of the air and give it to your plants.
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A
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, you know, sits in the roots of certain plants. Okay, that's, that's it. You can't. To a large scale, you cann 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
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help plants do the chemistry that plants need to do inside themselves.
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A
Yeah, there was a point in history where this was like a really big deal, like a really, really, really big problem. This is like 1800s in particular, the point where, you know, farming was getting more and more intensive. The population of the, of the 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 on it. I mean, fertilizer is essentially nitrogen.
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B
That's, I mean, that's, that's what it's there for, primarily.
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A
That's literally what it's there for. And farmers were, you know, using soil, a particular field a few times, 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. Come in, 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 limits of the land. So people were genuinely terrified that there was going to be mass starvation across the entirety of the world unless this nitrogen problem was sorted.
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B
Was it?
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A
Wait, well, okay, but, you know, do you know what they did before you could, like, make nitrogen? Do you know what they used to do?
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B
They would use, like, manure.
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A
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.
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B
Wait, is it not liquid gold anymore?
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A
I'm sorry to disappoint.
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B
I've got to call my accountant. I've got way too much human poop to not be worried.
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A
It's in your pip board with all your beard hair.
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B
I didn't realize that Haber had done anything. Is it not valuable?
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A
Not anymore in Japan, by the way. Okay, so this was like a process that people had perfected 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.
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B
Nice.
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A
And, you know, also, by the way, the price of the fertilizer would fluctuate depending on the social class of the people who pooped it.
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B
Oh, no kidding. Really? Did it really make a difference?
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A
Yes, because the rigid people had broader, more varied diets. So there was more phosphorus in the food that they were eating, more nitrogen, more phosphorus. They were eating fresher foods. Right. So. But also in Britain, there. There was this massive industry going. Going on by people called gong farmers, 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.
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B
Right.
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A
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.
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B
Oh, dude. Okay, I need to call my accountant and my poop monger because I've made some mistakes.
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A
Well, just be careful because one of those mistakes could be cholera. Right. Like a lot of the outbreaks of cholera in European cities.
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B
Okay. So you gotta burn it.
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A
Yeah.
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B
And that makes it a little bit healthier.
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A
Yes, exactly. And then you can put it on.
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B
Put it on the fields, then you
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A
can put it on the fields.
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B
Okay.
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A
The other option, less stinky, definitely not less gross, was bones. Oh, so you can. There's like residual nitrogen in human bones.
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B
Grind them up. Yeah, yeah.
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A
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
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B
on the field just to grow more crops.
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A
This is this. I can think, demonstrates the desperation that
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B
there was 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.
- [11:21]
A
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 area of like absolute kind of arid air so that the droppings don't waste away, they don't wash away.
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B
Right, right.
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A
They just accumulate over, I mean, millennia.
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B
Wow. And so they don't. They don't like rot because it's just too dry for microbial life to.
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A
So you have just basically got this mountain of bird poop.
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B
Nice.
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A
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 offensive to kill any of the birds, to disturb any of the birds. And they had these really strict rules about how you would dis this bird poop to different. Different farms. But as soon as the Spanish got involved, 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 America's have got Midway Atoll, Baker island and Howland Island, Right, Really? Which are part of its Pacific naval empire. It has those because they had bird poop on them.
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B
I did not know that.
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A
Right. That was it. They were looking for poop.
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B
Wow.
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A
Isn't that extraordinary?
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B
Well, yeah.
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A
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, jeez, wow. You know, this is a lot of stuff, right?
- [13:30]
B
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.
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A
People live their lives.
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B
And I just got some for free.
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A
Yeah, well, don't people say, it's lucky to have a bird poo on you?
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B
That should be why that is.
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A
Hey, five pound fifty. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I can eat tomorrow. No, but this is.
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B
This is really, really significant that we had reached a point where to keep the human population thriving and growing was impossible. Like, any other species would have just reached that ceiling and died off down to a smaller population. But humans, as our story goes, always find a way.
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A
Always find a way.
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B
Always find a way.
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A
Yeah. And part of the reason why we found a way is because we knew that there was nitrogen literally, literally everywhere. Like, you can't, you know, most of the thing, breathe in loads of nitrogen. Breathe in loads of nitrogen. You're so literally surrounded by this stuff.
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B
And we, as a species, found a way to bend the Earth to our will and to say, give it up.
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A
Yeah. And not just we as a species, the villain slash hero of our story, Fritz Harbour, was the person who managed to.
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B
How did he do it?
- [14:52]
A
Okay, so. So the thing is, right, you 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 instantly. You break the. The nitrogen, you have N2. You break it and you swap in two hydrogen molecules instead to make NH2, which is ammonia.
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B
Oh, really? Okay, so hold on. How do you do this? Do you need a lot of energy?
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A
Oh, much energy. 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 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 got. You've got NH2 and you've got another NH2 here, it's being vibrated so violently that it just immediately splits back into N2.
- [15:52]
B
Oh, wow.
- [15:52]
A
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, nursed, who was the father of the third law of thermodynamics, right. 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 Harbour realized was that you could trick it. You could trick these molecules because if instead of just heating it up, you could also. Because ammonia, with the H2H's instead of
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B
a nitrogen atom is smaller, right.
- [16:26]
A
Then it's much more stable under high pressure. Oh, 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 500 degrees.
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B
Okay.
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A
And then if you take the ammonia away as it's created, it's stable. 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.
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B
And ammonia, what's the deal? It's good because it's got nitrogen in it that's more readily available to chemical processes.
- [16:58]
A
Yeah, 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.
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B
Yeah, yeah.
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A
I mean, that's what you're smelling, Right?
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B
Okay. Okay.
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A
There was another German Bosch who worked out how to put this into an actual manufacturing process.
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B
Okay.
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A
You have to be really care, by the way, because you've got. You've got like. It's like unbelievably high pressure and unbelievably high temperatures prone to exploding.
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B
Right.
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A
Which. 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 Opal site. This is in 1921. This is eight years after the ammonia synthesis plant was first put into operation.
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B
Was this in Germany?
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A
In modern day Germany. So 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 2,000 people, killing 500 of them. Right. Loads of severe injuries. I mean really, really, you have to be. It's really difficult to do this stably. 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.
- [18:30]
B
Sounds German.
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A
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 both sides of the coin of this single scientific advancement. Because it is no exaggeration to say that the explosion of the population that we have seen in the 1900s is almost single handedly down to the discovery by Franz Hubbard. Right. Without artificial fertilizer, we simply would not be able to sustain a population like this.
- [19:17]
B
That's right. And you know what, that, that quote from him is also foreshadowing every scientific innovation. You could say that same thing about nuclear energy, nuclear weapons. You could say the same thing about AI even like, well, it's going to really save us and it could also explode on us.
- [19:38]
A
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.
- [19:50]
B
Of billions of people. Which, yeah, I think I'd also throw in Borlaug there too for dwarf wheat, I believe. But like these agricultural.
- [19:59]
A
Go on. What's that?
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B
I don't know exactly. But there's like a kind of like they couldn't grow wheat in like India.
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A
Right.
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B
Cause 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 find, feed a lot more people. But you need fertilizer. So if you've just got the dwarf wheat but no fertilizer, you have nothing.
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A
Yeah.
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B
So yeah, haber, or how do you pronounce it?
- [20:26]
A
Haber.
- [20:27]
B
Haber.
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A
Haba. Whenever I do a German Accent in my head or German word in my head. I like to sort of imagine a quiet camp, German man and doing it, you know, so sort of like, haber, Haber. So haber really suddenly a thousand times better.
- [20:44]
B
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 gonna adapt the environment right now to our will.
- [21:00]
A
Yeah, yeah, exactly.
- [21:01]
B
And because of that, we could have billions of more people. I mean, I've looked into this. I was wondering if maybe if we aren't so human centric, Colonel Sanders saved even more lives in the sense that
- [21:16]
A
lots and lots of chickens exist as a result.
- [21:18]
B
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, 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.
- [21:35]
A
Yeah.
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B
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
- [21:50]
C
such a hunger for their flesh.
- [21:54]
A
Is Colonel Sanders solely responsible for that? Like, 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? How much of our appetite for chicken is down to him?
- [22:07]
B
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.
- [22:14]
A
Right.
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B
I mean, it's like Christmas tradition in China, I believe, 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 Hauer did the same thing by not just saving lives, but also making lives possible in the first place.
- [22:42]
A
Exactly.
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B
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.
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A
Yeah, right.
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B
It's like a pre save.
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A
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.
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B
Yeah, you know what? I'm gonna look this up, because I did find an answer. Or actually, my friend Anna helped me.
- [23:12]
A
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.
- [23:24]
B
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, thank you. That was a meme, like, 20 years ago. You've just discovered it.
- [23:44]
A
She's re memed. She's re memed.
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B
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 prevenient. Saving, anticipatory. Like, we're getting everything ready for you to exist. You aren't already alive. You aren't about to die, and we're going to cure you. You're just, like, possible because of this action. I'm saving your life. I'm prevening it.
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A
Prevening it.
- [24:18]
B
Yeah.
- [24:19]
A
I like that a lot.
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B
Yeah. And so Hubber did a lot to save existing lives and prevene future lives. So almost the majority of humans alive today are here because of him.
- [24:31]
A
Yeah. So actually, there's some calculations that have been wrong, which is that 50% of the nitrogen molecules in your body right now came about as a direct result of someone doing the Haberda Bosch process somewhere.
- [24:45]
B
My goodness, talk about changing the world.
- [24:48]
A
Right? Which half do you want to give back?
- [24:52]
B
None of it. I like the nitrogen atoms I have at the moment.
- [24:56]
A
I like them all. Okay. So if that's the good side of what he did, that's his kind of heroics.
- [25:00]
B
Yeah. How does he undo this?
- [25:01]
A
Goodness. How does he undo this? So, you know, provined 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 war up until this point. And it turns out that Harbour was very Excited about the fact that this exact same process of breaking this nitrogen bond could, with small modifications, fix nitrogen so you could make explosives. Ah, yeah. Okay. Nitrates is essentially what we're talking about here, which is absolutely essential for gunpowder. It's essential for shells. They, it is not. They are nitrogen compounds. Before the Harbor Bosch process, Germany's supply 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 the First World War. And then when the British Navy blockaded Germany in 1914 to cut off those supplies, the expectation was that Germany, the war was going to finish. What are you going to do? You can't fight a war when you don't have any explosives. And so harbor was like, okay, great, let's just make loads of this stuff. Like, let's get on it. Let's, you know, let's make absolutely loads and loads and loads of it. By the end of the war, you know, he had furnished Germany with half of their explosives came from, from, you know, the process, chemistry, essentially.
- [26:40]
B
Yeah.
- [26:40]
A
So, you know, without this, without this, Germany probably would have lost the war. Way, way, way quicker. Way quicker. And at least 7 million lives would have been saved.
- [26:52]
B
Okay, but there's more, isn't there?
- [26:54]
A
There's more because that's not even including all the people who were killed by the nitrates themselves during World War I, during World War I or afterwards, because nitrates still form an extremely important part of explosives. 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 First World War hadn't gone on as long Germany hadn't dug in as deep, the Treaty of Assay wouldn't have been as,
- [27:29]
B
as, as perceived as painful by them leading to certain political decisions and. Right.
- [27:34]
A
So on and so on and so on. 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 Harbour, 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.
- [28:05]
B
Really?
- [28:06]
A
And we're going to be talking about that after the break. This episode is brought to you by Cancer Research uk.
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C
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E
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- [31:34]
A
He. He really went in hard and.
- [31:38]
B
Cause he was patriotic. This for him was duty. It was good.
- [31:43]
A
Yeah. 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 Harper. He was the one who was pushing for all of this and doing the chemistry.
- [32:09]
B
What sorts of chemical weapons?
- [32:12]
A
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 and deleterious. And deleterious gases.
- [32:41]
B
Right, yeah. Thank you. I'm up to date on my history of poisonous warfare and I'm not up
- [32:48]
A
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.
- [33:00]
B
And what did they use?
- [33:02]
A
And actually, if you just bury big canisters.
- [33:05]
B
Oh, brother.
- [33:06]
A
Of chlorine gas in the ground near the trenches. Well, you're not using an artillery shell then, are you?
- [33:12]
B
A little bit of a loophole.
- [33:14]
A
So this is. This is what happened, right, in. In particular in. In Ypres in 1915. 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 Haber's chemistry. So under his direction, they secretly buried 6,000 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, when the wind shifted, they opened fire on. Open fire, 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.
- [34:34]
B
Jeez.
- [34:34]
A
Like really, really horrific. Even Hitler wasn't interested in chemical warfare on the battlefield.
- [34:40]
B
Oh, so wow. Even Hitler is like, dude, you've gone too far.
- [34:45]
A
Geez. 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.
- [35:04]
B
Well, yeah, and he thinks in his patriotism that his end is good, that any means are justified by the ends. But Haber, Haber, look, all we have is means, dude. Yeah, and let's just do a little tally here. I know you're not even done.
- [35:24]
A
Wait, let me just tell you about his wife really quickly before we do this.
- [35:26]
B
Oh, okay, okay.
- [35:27]
A
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.
- [35:41]
B
She's reacting to what happened at Ibrahim.
- [35:43]
A
Yeah. She's like, this is the worst. This is just a perversion of the ideals of science. She really dislikes it. Harbour'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. Geez. Right. Even after his wife's death, he gets straight back at it. He's looking at mustard gas, he's looking at foskein. He sets up this lab to try and work out cyanide based pesticides. One of which ends up becoming cyclon B, which I mean very tragically is then the poison that is used to murder 6 million Jews. And Haber, by the way, is a German Jew.
- [36:35]
B
Yeah, yeah.
- [36:36]
A
I mean it's really extraordinary the level of. Well, I don't even have a word for it.
- [36:43]
B
Well, it's like humanity and inhumanity, this guy. Okay, I'm gonna be God now. Okay, I'm gonna be doing the whole like, let's add up 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 prevene billions. Then you use that same technology to make explosives that will wind up killing, to date, 100 million people. 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 lead 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.
- [37:49]
A
So he didn't create it. His institution that he created and set up the research in, they created it, okay?
- [37:55]
B
So you get a half point for that one, a negative half point for that one. 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. Yeah, just say that.
- [38:26]
A
Yeah. But I have a question, though. God, if I may.
- [38:31]
B
You're gonna have one question, Mr. God. Dr. God. Actually, I didn't spend 10 working on that thesis to be called Mr. God.
- [38:43]
A
I wonder whether there was an inevitability to some of this. Anyway.
- [38:47]
B
What do you mean?
- [38:48]
A
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?
- [39:06]
B
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.
- [39:18]
A
Right.
- [39:18]
B
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.
- [39:35]
A
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, and there are really, in the Geneva Convention, there are really, really, really strong rules about using weapons like that and others on civilians in warfare, full stop. I think sometimes you kind of need the bad for the good to come to the fore, Right.
- [40:23]
B
That from the trauma, growth can happen, and it's a terrible rollercoaster ride. But the rollercoaster that Haber built was the tallest.
- [40:36]
A
It was the tallest. It was the fastest. Mm. Yeah. I'm glad you didn't ruin that quite profound sentence by doing the Kampf. German accent.
- [40:47]
B
I know. I have given it up.
- [40:49]
A
I should tell you about what happened at the end of his life, by the way. Okay, yeah, look, I've left these 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. You were also in the trenches. Yeah, 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 Veep, 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 at the Nobel Prize ceremony. And he died in 1934. He was stateless, exiled, abandoned by the country. He had served, you know, served with everything that he had, really. I don't feel too sad about that.
- [42:10]
B
No, it's hard to.
- [42:12]
A
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 harbor, 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.
- [42:34]
B
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.
- [42:45]
A
Do you think there's an inevitability to it?
- [42:48]
B
No, I don't think there's an inevitability to what consequences? Good and bad or just the advances?
- [42:56]
A
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.
- [43:06]
B
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?
- [43:43]
A
Yeah, I think that's a really cool way to think of it. The ultimate cure is more curiosity.
- [43:50]
B
Exactly. 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. But let's not stop the development of what could really help so many people.
- [44:05]
A
Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Well, we hope that we've helped you with this podcast. Yeah, it was sort of a bit of a depressing story really. I sort of want to do a bit of a jolly, happy, clappy ending, but there isn't one.
- [44:17]
B
But I think you're right. I think sometimes the depression is inspirational. And so yeah, stay curious, become more curious. And as always, you can reach out to us@thereestiscienceolhanger.com we'd love to hear from you.
- [44:33]
A
Yeah, or leave us a comment wherever you are getting this podcast. And we'll see you next week.
- [44:38]
B
See ya.
- [44:48]
G
Why did we really go to war with Iraq?
- [44:51]
H
And did Saddam Hussein really have weapons of mass destruction?
- [44:56]
G
I'm Gordon Carrera, national security journalist.
- [44:58]
H
And I'm David McCloskey, author and former CIA analyst. We are the hosts of the rest. And in our latest series, we are telling the true story of one of history's biggest intelligence failures. Iraq WMD.
- [45:12]
G
In 2003, the US and UK told the world that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. But they were wrong.
- [45:20]
H
This wasn't a simple lie. It was something far more complicated, far more interesting and far more dangerous.
- [45:27]
G
Spies who believe their sorts, forces, politicians who wanted the public to believe in the threat and a dictator who couldn't prove he'd already destroyed the weapons.
- [45:38]
H
In this series, we go deep inside the CIA and MI6. Go into the rooms where decisions were made and look at the sources who fabricated the intelligence that took us to war.
- [45:49]
G
The Iraq war reshaped the Middle east and permanently weakened public trust in governments and intelligence agencies, and its consequences are still playing out today.
- [45:59]
H
Plus, in a Declassified Club exclusive, we are joined by three people who are at the heart of the decision to go to war. Former head of MI6, Richard Dearlove, Tony Blair's former communications director Alistair Campbell, and former acting head of the CIA, Michael Morell.
- [46:14]
G
So get the full story by listening to the rest is classified and subscribing to the Declassified Club. Wherever you get your podcasts.