Hate Mail - On The Exemption Scientists Give Themselves From Questions Of Morality

Someone thinks I'm insufficiently pious in regard to the moral status of science because I mentioned that scientists gave themselves an exemption from questions of morality in what they produce.   To which I say, he or she can go screw themselves.   It happens whenever I mention that most obvious and salient fact about science and the phony halo of sanctity that is placed around it.

As the Nobel Prizes for this year are announced, as during every Nobel season recently around early November, I wished I had the time and language ability to look for any documentation surrounding some of the more morally appalling Nobel awards of the past, especially the 1918 Chemistry prize given to Fritz Haber for his synthesis of ammonia in a year when his work in pioneering gas warfare should have made him more eligible for being prosecuted for war crimes.   In looking him up at the official Nobel site, they tactfully frame that very notable feature of his biography

When the First World War broke out he was appointed a consultant to the German War Office and organised gas attacks and defences against them. This and other work undermined his health and for some time he was engaged in administrative work. He helped to create the German Relief Organisation and served on the League of Nations Committee on Chemical Warfare.

So, you see, HE was the real victim of his work pioneering the use of poison gas as a weapon.   No doubt others' health suffered from his work as well, though the official Nobel site doesn't go into details about that.

I will note that in 1918, as the scientific establishement and the Nobel juries were awarding that prize to Haber, they didn't award a prize for Peace or for Medicine.  Or literature.

I'd really like to know what kind of discussion may or, perhaps even more tellingly, may not have passed among those who nominated and awarded the prize to Fritz Haber that year, what discussion of his activities in the war that didn't end until November 11th of that year were part of that decision.  I wonder if the end of the war overlapped with the Nobel season - perhaps having something to do with why a "Peace prize" was not given that year, nor one for Medicine, nor for Literature.  Max Planck got the physics prize, something that is certainly not shocking in the same way.    

This passage from the official Nobel article on their 1918 Chemistry laureate shows that his work was instrumental in the extension of that entirely idiotic war before two-stepping into the more pacific use of Haber's process.

In 1905 he had published his book on the thermodynamics of technical gas reactions, in which he recorded the production of small amounts of ammonia from N₂ and H₂ at a temperature of 1000° C with the help of iron as a catalyst. Later he decided to attempt the synthesis of ammonia and this he accomplished after searches for suitable catalysts, by circulating nitrogen and hydrogen over the catalyst at a pressure of 150-200 atmospheres at a temperature of about 500° C. This resulted in the establishment, with the cooperation of Bosch and Mittasch, of the Oppau and Leuna Ammonia Works, which enabled Germany to prolong the First World War when, in 1914, her supplies of nitrates for making explosives had failed.

You have to suspect that they thought that was something to celebrate in the inverted values of the scientific inconsideration of morality.

Perhaps they suspected awarding a "Peace prize" that year would have left the Nobel establishment open to a level of cynical mockery that it too seldom has gotten for anything other than some of the Literary and Peace prize winners. Perhaps it would have brought up the widespread suspicion that Haber's first wife, Clara Immerwahr, the first woman to get a doctorate in Chemistry in Germany, a woman's rights supporter and pacifist, committed suicide because she was so ashamed to be married to a war criminal, something that has been too little mentioned. 


You have to wonder what they meant by it, giving a war criminal that prize, that year.   I have to imagine it was something of a celebration and declaration that science was exempt from questions of morality and even decency.   It's certainly something that is obvious in them making that award to that person in that year.  It was hardly the only morally dubious award of a Nobel.  Giving the "Peace prize" to Henry Kissinger and Le Duc Tho the most notorious but, as the award to Haber shows, hardly the only thoroughly disgusting one.  I'd certainly include the one given to the Nazi, Konrad Lorenz among those. 

Update:  I was curious to see the Biography that the Official Nobel site had for Konrad Lorenz and found they had an auto-biographical thing written by Lorenz, himself.  He skates rather easily over his direct involvement with the Nazi regime thusly.
 
I wrote about the dangers of domestication and, in order to be understood, I couched my writing in the worst of nazi-terminology. I do not want to extenuate this action. I did, indeed, believe that some good might come of the new rulers. The precedent narrow-minded catholic regime in Austria induced better and more intelligent men than I was to cherish this naive hope. Practically all my friends and teachers did so, including my own father who certainly was a kindly and humane man. None of us as much as suspected that the word “selection”, when used by these rulers, meant murder. I regret those writings not so much for the undeniable discredit they reflect on my person as for their effect of hampering the future recognition of the dangers of domestication.

Being somewhat familiar with him from my research into eugenics and Darwinism  this passage about his activities in 1942 jumped out at me.  


In spring 1942 I was sent to the front near Witebsk and two months later taken prisoner by the Russians. At first I worked in a hospital in Chalturin where I was put in charge of a department with 600 beds, occupied almost exclusively by cases of so-called field polyneuritis, a form of general inflammation of nervous tissues caused by the combined effects of stress, overexertion, cold and lack of vitamins. Surprisingly, the Russian physicians did not know this syndrome and believed in the effects of diphteria – an illness which also causes a failing of all reflexes. When this hospital was broken up I became a camp doctor, first in Oritschi and later in a number of successive camps in Armenia. I became tolerably fluent in Russian and got quite friendly with some Russians, mostly doctors. I had the occasion to observe the striking parallels between the psychological effects of nazi and of marxist education. It was then that I began to realize the nature of indoctrination as such.

But it didn't keep him from publishing in support of Nazi ideology the next year  as in most of the previous decade.

These [papers relevant to the topic] were "Die angeborenen Formen moglicher Erfahrungen (1943) and "Durch Domestikation Verursachte Storungen" (1940).   In them Lorenz justifies the Nazi efforts to prevent interbreeding of persons of different so-called races (it must be noted that the German concept of race bore little relation to what most anthropologists, and certainly biologists, understand by the term).  Basically, Lorenz's argument was that since displays of waterfowl are species-specific, hybridiation destroys the integrity of the releasor mechanism andn leads to the destruction of the species.   By analogy, humans are believed to possess relasors for ethical and esthetic values which are lost through "hybridization."  

A number of the scientists who not only worked during the Nazi period but gave support to their eugenics which are inseparable from their genocidal programs were entirely and successfully installed in post-war science in virtually every field, often without any more effort at rehabilitation than is present in Lorenz's officially published Nobel auto-biography.   I have to say that reading it makes me want to now more about what Konrad Lorenz was doing in various "camps" that he mentions in it.  How much doctoring and how much using the inmates as guinea pigs. 

Update 2:  I should mention the well known fact that Haber's post-war invention of an insecticide, Zyklon, was modified and used in the Nazi gas chambers to prevent the kind of "hybridization" that Lorenz warned against.