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by WalterBright 139 days ago
Food produced by Fritz Haber's Haber-Bosch process (making fertilizer) supports about half of the world's population.
2 comments

He has quite a bit of chemical warfare weighing down his record.
He killed millions. He fed billions.
Epstein was friendly with, and made more people smile, than he raped.

Phil Spector produced music which meant a lot to a lot of people. Still a murderer.

Harold Shipman Saved the lives of thousands, yet should always be labelled a mass murderer because he knowingly positioned hundreds.

>Harold Shipman Saved the lives of thousands

Probably not though, I don't think a typical GP saves thousands of lives

Not alone, but as a team I bet he did. Just as Fritz Haber did not personally save countless millions with his discovery, thousands of other people had to be involved there as well.
Billions. The total carrying capacity of the Earth maxes out at 4bn people, even with maximally optimized agriculture and a vegetarian diet. The extra half of the Earth's population today owe their existence to Haber-Bosch.

It really was a two-man team that discovered nitrogen fixation - the other being not Carl Bosch, but Robert Le Rossignol who assisted Haber in developing his bench-scale nitrogen fixing reactor. Carl Bosch led the team that scaled it up, and that was a large effort of hundreds of people.

There is no reason to believe that a lack of nitrogen was a problem in particular. It seems that most effort was spent on getting fertilizers with phosphorus and other minerals, nitrogen was secondary, as many plants can obtain it from the air. If anything, it allows our modern, heavily cereal skewed diet. Poor nutrition rarely meant an absolute lack of food, most of the time it only meant insufficuent quality, and the green revolution was a massive step backward in that regard
Plants cannot obtain nitrogen from the air. You are deeply misinformed on this subject.
> Plants cannot obtain nitrogen from the air

That is literally true, but for anyone who hasn't studied plant biology, I think that "some plants have evolved specific structures to host obligate symbiotic bacteria that obtain nitrogen from the air and convert it into a form usable by the plant" is close enough to "many plants can obtain [nitrogen] from the air".

(A link for anyone not familiar with this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Root_nodule)