Amazing segment, fritz haber is the most interesting person i've never heard of.

Ok, I have to say this because no one else has. But firstly, I am a big fan of the show. Now on to the correction! It's not a "prince nez" it's a pince-nez (in French "pince" means "pinch" and "nez" means "nose") and it's pronounced pretty much like "pance nay." There. Phew! Had to get that out of my system! That was bugging me.

Rats! John Reeves from Portland beat me to it! Here's my 5cents....
Haber pursued the production and use of chlorine gas as a new weapon of war - does this make him bad? If so, what does it say about anybody else who develops a new weapon - stealth bombers, drones etc, or about Barnes Wallis who developed tha "Dam Buster" bouncing bomb, and also the first 10 ton bomb for use in WW2? Wallis was a British hero, but to me, these guys are morally equivalent - helping their country in time of war. I'm not sure that if I was part of a war effort (and as a chemical engineer), I'd be saying no to working on enhanced explosives or similar.
Unfortunately, I think the add-on about Zyklon-B was a distraction, the odourless "B" only came about after Haber's death.
Still, I thank Radiolab for another stimulating program!

It all depends on who is telling the story. I can see a one to one comparison between Fritz and Einstein (within its own measure of comparison), however I do not know anyone judging Einstein as war criminal (including myself).

What perhaps is even sadder and stranger is that
Hitler allegedly had a “vision” to save Germany while recuperating from a Gas attack in 1918.
Add that with the fact that the Nazi use the Gas Fritz indirectly helped developed the gas used in the camps and its quite vexing.

I think the proposed moral quandary here is that, given that this same man invented horrible things and great things, was his existence a net positive or a net negative? For this to be a quandary requires two rather questionable assumptions: First, that his procedure for fixing atmospheric nitrogen would not have been invented by someone else had he not, and second, that his innovations in chemical warfare would not have been invented by someone else had he not. Given the nature of innovation through the ages (namely, when an idea's time comes, people tend to converge on it -- think Leibniz–Newton, Marconi-Bose-Tesla, Edison-Swan, or numerous others), I find both unlikely.

It seems to me that this episode created something of a manufactured quandary with regard to Haber's good/bad characterization by examining only the results of his work, without considering his intentions. The description of his behavior, right down to the cold-hearted indifference to his wife's death and son's abandonment, demonstrates there is no quandary at all; this man clearly cared only for that which gave him a sense of pride, accomplishment and personal fulfillment, regardless of the consequences. By my way of thinking, this makes him quite simply bad. The fact that he accomplished something that benefited mankind was simply an accidental side-effect of his selfish pursuits. The show unfortunately equates the question "would the world have been better or worse off without him?" with the question "was he good or bad?". Those are two very different questions, and most worldviews value intention quite highly. It makes for very thought-provoking radio, and I enjoyed it tremendously, but equating those questions isn't really justified.

Of course, if your intentions were honest, I'll give you more credit than if you knowingly confused the issues to create the quandary for the sake of drama :) In any case, thanks for making me think!

Who's version of "Two Guitars" is used in the end of this segment? Wonderful use of the song to reverberate the chilly ending. Although, this song isn't overtly Jewish, it is a folk staple in my Russian-Jewish family.

At minute 32 of The Bad Show, the narrator says that three nitrogen atoms cling to each other with a very strong bond in the nitrogen found in the atmosphere. This is incorrect. Two nitrogen atoms cling to each other with a triple bond -- which is very strong. Nitrogen is N2 not N3. I backed up and listened to it three times to make sure I was hearing correctly. I am shocked to find a basic error like this! Love the show so much I can forgive the error.

It's a traditional Russian Gypsy folk song, usually called simply "Two Guitars."

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Np63Ry-xU8w&

what's the piece of music you use at the end of this episode, team Radiolab? really like it.. in a sad, melancholy way..

I have no moral quams about Haber inventing zykon-B. It is certainly ironic, that a Jewish man invented the Gas that was used during the holocaust. But he was the scientist who invented and started using the deadly gases during the First World War. It is in no way ironic or strange, that a man who invented a gas used to kill people, would later have his invention used to kill people.

It's like you're trying to make history majors out of the lot of us! Hot damn this a great show.

Great show but I take issue with your placing of Haber's process for the conversion of atmospheric nitrogen to ammonia so quickly in the category of good. Synthetic nitrogen certainly revolutionized agriculture and has allowed for billions of humans to live along with all our pigs, cows, chickens, dogs and cats. And of course kittens are adorable and synthetic nitrogen isn't inherently evil. But we can't so quickly ignore the consequences of its abuse in soil degradation and pollution even if we pass over the myriad of other problems caused by a all those billions of people of lived off food it helped produce.

Soil and clean water are required for the sustenance of humanity. The current practices of industrial agriculture which abuse and are entirely dependent on synthetic nitrogen feed the world now, but also guarantee their starvation later; when the loss of top soil and desertification of land erases the gains in production allowed by synthetic nitrogen.

And where was the shout out for the diazotrophs? They can make atmospheric nitrogen into ammonia too! And I am sure they have at least a dark history devouring other bacteria or releasing some sort microbial death gas.

@anise I do not agree - I think that Radiolab's treatment of the Haber story was perfect - the emphasis was on human fallibility not the inventions themselves. One might ask: should we give up scientific progress in fear that it might misused or lead to some bad unintended consequences? Using Haber as an example: would it be better not to have invented nitrogen fertilizers and let the nature keep our population in check by constantly killing us off with famine, malnutrition and sickness?

Also, about weather Haber was bad or not. I think his intentions were to help the side of the war he thought was right, and he did so in a pretty direct way. If you think you are right in a war, then your goal is to end the war as soon as possible with you as the winner. I don't think he was wrong here.

And while I agree that 7 billion people is not inherently a good thing, the Haber-Bosch process allows us to produce more food with less land, which definitely is a good thing. I.e., if our population stayed the same we could disrupt less ecologies. What we choose to do with that ability is a different matter, as currently people are reluctant to control population - something we definitely have to do at some point.

In short, we can fit a farm in a smaller space ship than we otherwise could :)

I second that. Awesome show, I just wish I could find out what all the music was. I liked what was at the end of the Haber section. Are there show credits somewhere that I don't know about?

Haber strikes me as a "because I can" person. I don't think he pursued those scientific processes to save the world. He did it to feed his vanity. Total sociopath.

Ahhhhh! What is the bumper music at the end of the Haber piece. It's driving me nuts not to remember.

http://m.sciencemag.org/content/279/5353/988.full

@anise I agree, with ecological hindsight being 20/20 Haber was all bad. Of course this does away the Manichean narrative but so be it. Now I'm curious about Bosch's (as in the Haber-Bosch process) story.

Loved this show, especially this segment on Fritz Haber. I had never heard his story before and it's a really fascinating and morally complex one.

A small quibble on your chemistry that I thought you might want to be aware of, though: nitrogen being trivalent doesn't mean that 3 nitrogen atoms bond together, as Jad seems to imply. Nitrogen gas is actually diatomic (meaning the compound is N2), but there is a triple bond (three pairs of shared electrons) between those 2 nitrogen atoms, so that they are very difficult to split apart.

I love radiolab, and this was the very first time that I was disapointed with it's reporting. It is a very narrow view to deem Haber's extraction of nitrogen as an overall good thing for humankind. The use of synthetic fertilizers and pesticides are profoundly damaging to all different elements in the ecosystem: soil, water, animals, fish, microbacteria etc. Certainly it has benefited humankind in a very limited sense, but in the long run, we will suffer from the consequences. This further demonstrates the tragic habit in our culture of seeing human benefit exclusive of environmental benefits. Haber would have contributed much greater things had he considered the whole biosphere in his invention rather than just the human need.

I feel like this boils down to "the road to hell is paved with good intentions." Ultimately, I don't know that you can say one person is good or bad; people and their actions have so many ramifications, and when they do huge, revolutionary things like this guy did, those consequences are multiplied exponentially. Haber's discoveries fed billions of people. They also killed millions of people. Whenever we create something on such a grand scale, it seems to slip out of our control almost immediately. There's no way to tell how things will turn out, and even if you could, how could you decide between all the possible options? People and events are too complicated to bestow a single judgement on them.

what's so great about 7 billion people in the world? more spouses for the haber's of the world to walk away from? one could argue that much of the horror in the world we now live in is a direct result of haber's unleashing of nitrogen. and to jad, he imagined killing with chlorine gas, sure he imagined THAT, he just never expected it to be turned against him in the way that it is. this makes me ponder the dilemma of science for the sake of science.

is the world better with him? no. the way i reconcile this is to imagine that if Fritz didn't invent the nitrogen-to-ammonia process, someone else would have. great ideas have a way of unfolding into the world. Fritz didn't invent all of the equipment to perform this feat, nor did he invent the mathematics to model molecular processes... he just put the pieces together. many other great conversations will evolve from this segment - so thanks.