Immoral science experiment which came back to haunt scientist

Imagine being in a trench.

Gunfire is zipping over your head. You are pinned in, you can’t escape.

You peer up over the edge of the dirt across the blackened flat plane of destruction.

You hear German shouting.

Then, you see a giant cloud, a wall of gas standing twice as high as you are tall. It is hundreds of meters wide.

It is moving towards you.

You try to crawl out and attempt to run but bullets immediately hit the ground next to you. Spraying up dirt.

You dive back into the trench. You can’t escape.

You peer up over the trench again. The cloud moves closer.

Bugs and small animals dive out of holes and run for their lives.

As the gas overcomes some of them, the bugs immediately turn upside down and begin spasming.

Rats drop in their tracks and begin squirming and writhing in pain.

The wall moves closer and closer.

50 meters.

40 meters.

30 meters.

20 meters.

10 meters.

Your turn.

______
Death by gas.

Drowning inside your own body. The fate that greeted nearly 100,000 people in World War 1.

Designed by German Scientist Fritz Haber.

He not only didn’t feel guilty about this innovation but actually reveled in the glory and acclaim he received from the German military.

Now, his wife Clara, on the other hand, knew exactly what was up with his latest research.

She was a great scientist herself. She knew, intimately, the human experience that would accompany the inhalation of this gas.

She and Fritz got into huge blowout fights about the immorality of militarized gas.

Ultimately, he was indifferent to her objections. He was excited to be developing this weapon and was enjoying great notoriety and promotions he’d received for it.

One night, Fritz and his wife had a particularly bitter fight. Afterward — Fritz went to sleep, again indifferent.

Clara went inside, found a gun, walked out into their back yard, and shot herself in the chest. Her 13-year-old son found her and stayed with her while she died, bleeding out.

And Fritz?

The very next day, Fritz went to the front line in Germany to carry out the first gas attack, which would have human beings dying in ways that are beyond description, a form of suffering that is straight out of the depths of hell.

And then things got darker.

Years after WW1, Nazi Germany began to rise, and so, in turn, did antisemitism.

Fritz Haber was Jewish. He became unsettled and moved away from the country.

He died in 1934, in Switzerland.

Later, the Nazis went to his lab. He was a Nobel Prize-winning chemist with lots of innovations. One such innovation was Zyklon gas.

Now if any of you know what Zyklon is, your stomach probably just turned.

Zyklon A was a nerve agent used on bugs.

The Nazis took Zyklon A, modified it into Zyklon B, and then used it as the gas of choice in the Nazi gas chambers.

Let me be more blunt: Haber’s own invention was used to kill millions of Jews including his own family members.

This is perhaps an excessively cruel act of karma that Haber could have never foreseen, but it happened nonetheless.

Let us hope we never use gas on humans again.