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April 8, 2002
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Military Research and Scientific Responsibility: Remembering Fritz Haber
A few months ago when many people feared that the attack on the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center would be followed soon by terrorist attacks with chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons, I remembered one of my biochemistry lectures in Berlin several years ago. On a dark and cold evening, our professor, a neurochemist, decided to take us for a walk and tell us about the history of the surrounding institutes. Just a few steps from the lecture hall, we stopped in front of the Fritz Haber Institute of Physical Chemistry, one of Berlin's Max Planck Institutes.Fritz Haber, a brilliant scientist in the field of physical chemistry, found a way to fix nitrogen from the air. Under high pressure and in the presence of a catalyst, nitrogen and hydrogen gas react to produce ammonia. Haber's colleague Carl Bosch later adjusted the reaction conditions for large-scale use in the chemical industry. Suddenly, massive quantities of fertilizers could be produced, and importing guano from remote places such as South America became unnecessary. Haber was awarded the Nobel Prize in chemistry in 1918. Bosch (along with Friedrich Bergius) received the same award in 1931.
Mixing Science and Politics
Haber, who considered himself a German patriot, was already a prominent scientist and the director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Physical Chemistry in Berlin (now the Fritz Haber Institute) when World War I broke out. Before the war, Germany's emperor, Wilhelm II, had ruled his country with an iron fist. He entered a maritime arms race with the U.K. and was trying to turn his country into a colonial empire. During this period, Wilhelm's generals brutally crushed the Hereo uprising in the new German colony of Namibia and the Boxer rebellion in China, where Germany possessed the small colony of Qingdao (Tsingtao). Despite all this, Fritz Haber--along with many members of the German elite--lent his support to Emperor Wilhelm II and the German army.Eager to serve his country, Haber did his best to overcome the lack of raw materials. He reorganized German industry and came up with substitute materials that would reduce the need for imports, which had become almost impossible because of the British Royal Navy's blockade. The Haber-Bosch process proved very useful for manufacturing explosives.
In the end all these measures prolonged a senseless war, resulted in the slaughter of soldiers, and did not prevent casualties among the civilian population due to famines and disease.
Haber also ensured that the capabilities of his scientists would be used to develop a new kind of weapon: Fritz Haber became the inventor of chemical warfare. On April 22, 1915, German troops released chlorine gas from 5,000 steel cylinders, killing and injuring thousands of French and Commonwealth soldiers in the trenches near the Belgian town of Ypres. Since Wilhelm's skeptical generals had considered the use of chlorine an experiment, the German army was completely unprepared for the scale of its deadly effect. The new weapon failed to give the German forces a desperately needed victory because not enough troops had been ordered to this part of the front. Moreover, by violating the Hague Convention that outlawed the use of poisonous weapons, Haber had become a war criminal.
In 1901 Fritz Haber had married Clara Immerwahr, one of the few women of her time who was allowed an academic career. Immerwahr, a highly talented researcher who had earned a PhD in chemistry, was adamantly opposed to the gas attacks that her husband organized. Just a few days after the first use of chlorine, she committed suicide, shooting herself with Haber's army pistol.
In 1933, shortly after the Nazi Party took power, anti-Jewish decrees resulted in the sudden dismissal of Jewish scientists. Many of these highly talented researchers, Albert Einstein being the most prominent, recognized the danger and fled the country. Haber, a Protestant of Jewish descent, was not immediately threatened because of his status as one of the leading scientists in his field, but many of the researchers in his institute were mercilessly fired. This forced Haber to resign and to leave his country. Already severely ill and broken in spirit, he died during a recuperative trip to Switzerland on January 29, 1934.
Keeping a Lid On
More than 80 years after Fritz Haber spearheaded the effort to develop chemical warfare techniques, military research in countries with few democratic controls remains a pressing issue. In the late 80s, the Iraqi military used chemical warfare, poisoning entire towns in Northern Iraq to wipe out Kurdish guerillas and inflict as many casualties as possible among Kurdish civilians. During the last standoff between India and Pakistan, nuclear weapons were detonated as a show of strength. Both examples show that these countries successfully carried out military research programs.The collapse of the Warsaw Pact increased the problem. After the Cold War, many scientists in Russia and Eastern European states that had previously worked for the military found themselves without jobs. NATO member states are now trying to keep these scientists employed.
A few months ago, a friend of mine from grad school, who is interested in exotic viruses of the lethal kind, sent me an e-mail from a formerly secret city in the heart of Russia. He explained that he had been hired by a U.S. Department of Defense contractor and was now working as a scientific liaison in a former biological weapons lab. The money from the U.S. was to ensure funding for non-military research and to prevent the once well-paid scientists from selling their knowledge to the highest bidder.
The example of Fritz Haber indicates that it would probably be naive to think that all scientists adhere to a strict ethical code of conduct. Multilateral agreements, constant inspections of military research facilities, a strict export ban on weapon components, and financial support for conversion projects, along with close monitoring by international organizations and intelligence agencies, are among the necessary precautions to prevent the misuse of scientific knowledge.
--Jan Schmollinger, an HMS research associate in medicine at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute
The opinions expressed in this column are not necessarily those of Harvard Medical School, its affiliated institutions, or Harvard University.