Lan D. Ho!
"At least I know now how not to impress you." //
I Came to Game
January 19, 2011
"It was more than Fritz Haber's wife could bear. Clara Immerwahr had been Haber's childhood sweetheart. She was the first woman to win a doctorate in chemistry from the University of Breslau. After she married Haber and bore him a son, a neglected housewife with a child to raise, she withdrew progressively from science and into depression. Her husband's work with poison gas [during the First World War] triggered even more melancholy. 'She began to regard poison gas not only as a perversion of science but also as a sign of barbarism,' a Haber biographer explains. 'It brought back the tortures men said they had forgotten long ago. It degraded and corrupted the discipline [i.e., chemistry] which had opened new vistas of life.' She asked, argued, finally adamantly demanded that her husband abandon gas work. Haber told her what he had told Hahn, adding for good measure, patriot that he was, that a scientist belongs to the world in times of peace but to his country in times of war.1 Then he stormed out to supervise a gas attack on the Eastern Front. Dr. Clara Immerwahr committed suicide the same night." (Richard Rhodes, The Making of the Atomic Bomb, 95)
1 Otto Hahn on Fritz Haber: "He explained to me that the Western fronts, which were all bogged down, could be got moving again only by means of new weapons. One of the weapons contemplated was poison gas.... When I objected that this was a mode of warfare violating the Hague Convention he said that the French had already started it—though not to much effect—by using rifle ammunition filled with gas. Besides, it was a way of saving countless lives, if it meant that the war could be brought to an end sooner." (ibid., 92–93)
