Today I talk with my friend Don about the complicated history of Fritz Haber. Haber won a Nobel Prize for discovering a way to fix nitrogen from the atmosphere, leading to manmade fertilizer and increasing the world’s food supply by up to 50%. He also developed chemical weapons during WWI.

My numbers for current nitrogen usage come from this paper: Galloway et al. 2008, Science: 320, 889-892

http://sciencestorytime.podomatic.com/enclosure/2016-02-25T15_21_19-08_00.m4a