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Chains of Consequences: How the Terrible Gas Warfare of World War One Saved Millions of Lives from Cancer

World War One was prolonged because German scientists had developed the Haber-Bosch Process to produce nitrates from nitrogen and hydrogen—which meant Germany was no longer dependent on imports of naturally-occurring nitrates from guano islands, and a blockade was ineffective.

I'm assuming that this refers to the blockade being ineffective with regard to fertiliser, rather than the blockade being ineffective. I'm not familiar enough with the figures for the former to be able to meaningfully comment.

In general, and across the broad spectrum, the blockade devastated Germany. I look at the effect of the blockade on food supplies in an earlier article

chemotherapy has always remained a case of ‘find a poison that kills the cancer faster than it kills the patient’,

Can confirm.
Yes, that was a bit ambiguously phrased, I mostly meant to do with explosives (though obviously the fertiliser did help, it wasn't enough to overcome the food shortages).
 
Yes, that was a bit ambiguously phrased, I mostly meant to do with explosives (though obviously the fertiliser did help, it wasn't enough to overcome the food shortages).

In an interesting AH hypothesis, Dave Freer's Cuttlefish has its POD of Haber having a bad fallout with Clara Immerwahr (great name) and never being able to come up with the process without her help, making WWI a lot shorter but also having climate change be disastrously strong by no later than the mid twentieth century.
 
A quote attributed to Isaac Asimov states that the most exciting phrase in science is not ‘Eureka!’ but ‘Hmm, that’s funny…’

That's even truer when one considers what it means in the original Greek: Eureka doesn't strictly mean 'I've found [the solution]' but rather 'I've stopped looking' with the implied meaning one has been successful. Of course, while Archimedes was doing a mundane piece of work over whether a goldsmith had defrauded his cousin, the tyrant of Syracuse, he ended up discovering a fundamental principle of science, so it's still an illustration of the underlying point of your article.
 
That's even truer when one considers what it means in the original Greek: Eureka doesn't strictly mean 'I've found [the solution]' but rather 'I've stopped looking' with the implied meaning one has been successful. Of course, while Archimedes was doing a mundane piece of work over whether a goldsmith had defrauded his cousin, the tyrant of Syracuse, he ended up discovering a fundamental principle of science, so it's still an illustration of the underlying point of your article.

Wasn't that the gold water displacement experiment?
 
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