IN 1924, FIVE YEARS AFTER he had won the Nobel Prize for this discovery, Fritz Haber spoke at the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia, extolling the virtues of science. “The banker and the lawyer, the industrialist and the merchant, despite their leading positions in life, are only administrative officials,” he said. “The sovereign is natural science. Its progress determines the measure of prosperity of man; its cultivation is the seed from which the welfare of future generations grow.”
