In 1910, Chemist Fritz Haber invented a way to fix nitrogen directly from the air using metalic catylists rather than live legumes. This led to a six-fold increase in crop yields, and pushed the long-expected mass starvation back several decades, until Borlaug could pick up the task.
In 1914, he made a similarly brilliant discovery in the scalable refinement of Chlorine gas for use in chemical warfare, then spent the rest of the war developing more effective poisons. His work is estimated to have killed ninety thousand men, and horribly injured many more.
You win some; you lose some.
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