Welcome to the Black Lab

Science doesn't care about your feelings.

A sentiment you'll see expressed often, especially in social media. It's the geek's take on 'you can't handle the truth.' 

Science claims to be the most noble of intellectual activities, a search for the ultimate truth, rising above mundane preoccupations. But it is still a human activity. And therefore prey to our frailties that get in the way of our everyday lives. Scientists are people, and all people are fallible. 

In this blog, I'm going to look at when science takes a darker turn. So let's start with my own discipline, chemistry. 

The Legacy of Fritz Haber

Chemists were the first scientists to face an 'ethical reckoning'. The invention of chemical weapons and their use in WWI tarnished their public image for decades. 

Fritz Haber became deeply controversial. He invented the Haber-Bosch process for making ammonia from nothing more than thin air and coal. And ultimately artificial fertilizers. Without these, the planet could only support half its current population at best. Most of the nitrogen atoms in our own bodies have passed through a chemical plant.

Fritz Haber, Nobel laureate

He also industrialized mass slaughter. He introduced chemical weapons to WWI. First chlorine gas, then phosgene and mustard gas. Haber justified his involvement by saying "during peace time a scientist belongs to the world, but during war time he belongs to his country". 

Clara

Clara Immerwahr

His wife, Clara Immerwahr, didn't see it the same way. She was a highly capable chemist in her own right, the first woman to achieve a PhD from the then University of Breslau. 

Their marriage was anything but happy. In a letter to a friend, she wrote:

It has always been my attitude that a life has only been worth living if one has made full use of all one's abilities and tried to live out every kind of experience human life has to offer. It was under that impulse, among other things, that I decided to get married at that time... The life I got from it was very brief...and the main reasons for that was Fritz's oppressive way of putting himself first in our home and marriage, so that a less ruthlessly self-assertive personality was simply destroyed.

She killed herself in May 1915 after an argument with Fritz. He had recently overseen the use of chlorine in Ypres, killing or injuring over 67,000 soldiers.

A British emplacement after a phosgene attack. Phosgene accounted for 85% of gas casualties in WWI.

Clara shot herself in the heart in their garden with Haber's own service pistol. She didn't die immediately but was found by her young son. What they argued about is anyone's guess, but immediately after the Ypres attack, Clara was outspoken:

“[Chemical warfare is] the perversion of the ideals of science [and] a sign of barbarity, corrupting the very discipline which ought to bring new insights into life.”

Aftermath 

Haber certainly didn't care about her feelings. He was unrepentant. He was also convinced of the morality of his work. When he was awarded the Nobel Prize for his industrial synthesis of ammonia, he stated:

"In no future war will the military be able to ignore poison gas. It is a higher form of killing".

The next ethical reckoning had to wait for WWII. But by then, it was the physicists' turn.

J Robert Oppenheimer, inventor of the atom bomb