It’s a well-known fact that we, as heterotrophic organisms, require food sources in order to survive. It also should be rather obvious that the current population of humans is well over 7 billion— a surmountable number of mouths to feed, even if some are more well-fed than others. The incredible scientific breakthrough that made such a large population even remotely feasible to sustain is credited to Fritz Haber and Carl Bosch, in a process that industrialized that which nature could not produce at the level we required: the production of reactive ammonia-based compounds.
The process of nitrogen fixation is one of the most fundamental processes that allows for life as we know it to exist. It converts (or ‘fixes’) the incredibly inert gaseous nitrogen that comprises over 70% of our atmosphere into the more reactive ammonia-group of molecules, which plants can use to biosynthesize the most fundamental molecules in life, such as nucleic acids and nucleotides. In nature, the majority of nitrogen fixation is conducted by various forms of bacteria, fungi, and legumes, with the help of an aptly named enzyme: nitrogenase. There are many biochemical quirks to this enzyme— for example, it is heavily prone to oxidative damage, and as a result nitrogen fixation is all but halted when the organism is subjected to significant oxygen levels.
In the early twentieth century, there were incredible concerns that the rapidly increasing human population could not be sustained with the plateauing agricultural growth. But this was not the only concern on people’s mind, as World War I was also a large influence on worldwide affair—and is partially the reason why the Haber-Bosch Process came to fruition. Germany, the home country of both Haber and Bosch, had munitions supplies crippled when Allied forced blockaded trade routes from South America, preventing shipments of guano and saltpeter, which was the country’s primary source for fixed nitrogen. Loss of access to these prevented Germany from producing any nitric acid— a primary chemical for the manufacturing of explosives. Haber and Bosch’s research into industrial-level nitrogen production is suspected to be primarily motivated by this deficit of nitric acid during the war, and not the impending threat of worldwide famine.
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