The Man Who Killed Millions and Saved Billions (Clean Version)

the 1918 Nobel Prize for chemistry is probably the most important Nobel Prize ever awarded it was given to German scientist Fritz hobber for solving one of the biggest problems Humanity has ever faced his invention is directly responsible for the lives of 4 billion people today but when he received his prize many of his peers refused to attend two other Nobel Prize winners rejected their Awards in protest and the New York Times wrote a scathing article about him he is simultaneously one of the most impactful and tragic scientists of all time perhaps more than any other single person he has shaped the world we live in [Music] today if you are an American citizen and you find an island with a lot of bird poop on it well then you can claim that Island for the United States and the us will have your back the president is authorized to send in the Navy and the Army to defend your newly discovered poop covered Island there are currently 10 American islands that were claimed in this way and even though the law that made this possible was passed in 1856 it is still in effect to this day so why did people want poop covered Islands so badly there are a few dozen islands off the coast of Peru where millions of seabirds gather to mate the waters near the island are full of fish and these millions of birds eat the fish and then they poop a lot since the region is hot and dry this poop solidifies and accumulates over Millennia there are Cliffs of bird poop 30 m or 100 ft High technically bird poop is called guano and by the mid 1800s buying and selling bird Guana was Big Business the price Rose as high as $76 per pound meaning you could trade 4 lb of guano for one lb of gold so why was there such a big market for bird poop well to answer that we have to look inside the human body by weight most of our bodies are made up of oxygen carbon and hydrogen but the fourth most common element is nitrogen nitrogen is part of the amino acids that form proteins it's part of hemoglobin the compound that carries oxygen and red blood cells and it's a central component of DNA and RNA nitrogen is essential ...