Pandora's Lab: Seven Stories of Science Gone Wrong

by Paul A. Offit

They were called junkies, because they often sifted through junkyards to find salable items.

In the 1920s and early 1930s, heroin’s principal distributors were mobsters Meyer Lansky, Dutch Schultz, and Legs Diamond. (Because all three were Jewish, heroin was often called “smack,” from the Yiddish word schmecher, meaning “addict.”)

Appalachian emergency department physicians became experts in recognizing the symptoms of drug withdrawal, which included anxiety, runny nose, sweating, yawning, insomnia, loss of appetite, gooseflesh (the source of the phrase “going cold turkey”), back pain, abdominal pain, tremors, and occasional involuntary thrusting of the legs (the source of the phrase “kicking the habit.”)

They called it Crisco, a contraction of Crystallized cottonseed oil.

If every farmer in every country on every continent in the world used every inch of fertile land, sprinkled their fields with natural fertilizers, meticulously rotated their crops, and convinced everyone to eat a vegetarian diet, they could feed about four billion people.

For his efforts, Carl Bosch became the first person ever to win a Nobel Prize for commercializing a technology he didn’t invent.

Odd sort of distinction. How many more have there been, and who are they?

In 1982, 10 percent of China’s population was obese (weighing 35 percent or more above ideal body weight). By the early 1990s, that number had climbed to 15 percent. Today, more than 30 percent of people living in Beijing are overweight, and childhood obesity has become a national concern.

When the war was over, Albert Speer, the Third Reich’s architect, said that if the Allies had focused solely on eliminating the plant at Leuna, WWII could have ended in eight weeks.)

Haber believed that Germany would win not because its soldiers were braver or its military leaders shrewder, but because its chemists were smarter.

“The higher civilization rises,” wrote one German commander, “the viler man becomes.”

Haber believed that had the officers been bolder—and more willing to ignore the fact that 200 German soldiers were also poisoned and 12 killed by the gas—the war could have been won that day.

By the end of the war, with Fritz Haber as the ringmaster, more than a million people had been disabled and 26,000 killed by chemical weapons.

IN THE DEUTSCHES MUSEUM in Munich, separated from onlookers by a small barrier, stands the tabletop device Fritz Haber and Robert Le Rossignol built to fix nitrogen from the air.

On May 2, 1927, by a vote of 8 to 1, justices ruled in favor of Carrie Buck’s sterilization.

Who was the dissenting justice, and did he write a dissent?

am pessimistic about the human race,” wrote White, “because it is too ingenious for its own good. Our approach to nature is to beat it into submission. We would stand a better chance of survival if we accommodated ourselves to this planet and viewed it appreciatively instead of skeptically and dictatorially.”