overnight, the great german patriot and chemist, fritz haber, became "the jew" haber. he was forced to resign his post in berlin. he left the country. the next year he died of a heart attack. let's say it was a broken heart in exile abroad. captioning performed by the national captioning institute, inc. captions copyright 1989 educational film center and the university of maryland funding for this program was provided by... additional funding provided by the people of dow, the company that lets you do great things, the 8,000 scientists of the eastman kodak company, the exxon education foundation on behalf of exxon scientists, and... for information on this college telecourse, videocassettes, off-air videotaping, and books based on this series, telephone the annenberg/cpb project at... the play for this program, saint joan, by george bernard shaw. special guest, julie harris. now your host mr. jose ferrer. saint joan is essentially about sainthood, but there is a certain romantic quality to it as george bernard shaw sweeps his audience along in an almost poetic flight.

before world war i where two german scientist and an engineer named carl bosch and a chemist named fritz haberme up with the a way to pull mitogen out of the air and chemically slather it on the earth to fertilize plants. the invention of artificial nitrogen fertilizer might not come to your mind when you are thinking of inventions that have changed humankind but it's probably the biggest invention in terms of what it has done to us because it totally blew the lid off of what nature can do. how much plant life they can produce. as a result let's put it this way, 40% of us here in this tent would not the here without it. 40% of the people on the planet would not he here without artificial mitogen. it completely change the amount of food that we could grow. however it self is derived from fossil fuels both as its feedstock and because it takes a lot of energy that you have to burn to make this stuff and it also turns into nitrous oxide which after methane is our third most powerful greenhouse gas. now we have a situation on this planet where we are hooked into fossil fuels in more ways than one.