Thomas Hager > Quotes

“Where there were once several competing approaches to medicine, there is now only one that matters to most hospitals, insurers, and the vast majority of the public. One that has been shaped to a great degree by the successful development of potent cures that followed the discovery of sulfa drugs. Aspiring caregivers today are chosen as much (or more) for their scientific abilities, their talent for mastering these manifold technological and pharmaceutical advances as for their interpersonal skills. A century ago most physicians were careful, conservative observers who provided comfort to patients and their families. Today they act: They prescribe, they treat, they cure. They routinely perform what were once considered miracles. The result, in the view of some, has been a shift in the profession from caregiver to technician. The powerful new drugs changed how care was given as well as who gave it.”
― Thomas Hager, The Demon Under the Microscope: From Battlefield Hospitals to Nazi Labs, One Doctor's Heroic Search for the World's First Miracle Drug

“SOUTH AMERICA’S GREAT Atacama Desert is a place unlike any other. Its climate is different, with close to zero rainfall but occasional thick fogs. Its plants and animals are different—what there are of them, which is to say almost none—capable of living with almost no water. Even its rocks are different. The floor of the Atacama is crusted and shot through with a riot of strange chemicals: nitrates, chromates, and dichromates; perchlorates, iodates, sulfates, and borates; chlorides of potassium, magnesium, and calcium; minerals “so extraordinary,” a researcher wrote, “were it not for their existence, geologists could easily conclude that such deposits could not form in nature.” How”
― Thomas Hager, The Alchemy of Air: A Jewish Genius, a Doomed Tycoon, and the Scientific Discovery That Fed the World but Fueled the Rise of Hitler

“science at its best was a flower of Western culture, unbiased, apolitical, transnational, open, and progressive. It destroyed superstition and cant. It threw at least a little light into the darkness. And it worked.”
― Thomas Hager, The Demon Under the Microscope: From Battlefield Hospitals to Nazi Labs, One Doctor's Heroic Search for the World's First Miracle Drug

“science, properly used, could undo much of the damage men had done.”
― Thomas Hager, The Demon Under the Microscope: From Battlefield Hospitals to Nazi Labs, One Doctor's Heroic Search for the World's First Miracle Drug

“Universities began learning the art of turning the insights of their researchers into large chunks of money by hiring more lawyers and making new kinds of deals, becoming experts in protecting intellectual property, installing startup incubators, and building research parks. Seen from this angle, it looks like universities and scientists aren't fighting against the profit motive; they've been infected by it.”
― Thomas Hager

“Once, a colleague remembered, Haber was walking backward in his office, practicing bowing his way out of an imperial audience, when he knocked over and broke an expensive vase.”
― Thomas Hager, The Alchemy of Air: A Jewish Genius, a Doomed Tycoon, and the Scientific Discovery That Fed the World but Fueled the Rise of Hitler

“The National Academy of Sciences released a report in 1980 suggesting that widespread efforts to control cholesterol levels lacked a good scientific basis, and many researchers remained unconvinced that cholesterol was all that bad. Regardless, the public, spurred by their physicians, started getting their cholesterol checked and making lifestyle decisions based on the results.”
― Thomas Hager, Ten Drugs: How Plants, Powders, and Pills Have Shaped the History of Medicine

“The Nazis knew that their armed forces depended on gas from Leuna, so as the air attacks continued they gathered an army of 350,000 workers, including 7,000 engineers from the armed forces, all devoted to keeping the plant functioning.”
― Thomas Hager, The Alchemy of Air: A Jewish Genius, a Doomed Tycoon, and the Scientific Discovery That Fed the World but Fueled the Rise of Hitler

“There is no natural product that cannot, with perseverance, be manufactured.”
― Thomas Hager, The Alchemy of Air: A Jewish Genius, a Doomed Tycoon, and the Scientific Discovery That Fed the World but Fueled the Rise of Hitler

“It was a gesture of resignation. It was becoming clear that the Nazis were going to win the elections, the other companies were already donating large sums, and it was time for Farben to smooth relations with the government in power. Perhaps, he hoped, Hitler would be more sensible than he appeared. Whatever happened, he was likely to be chancellor for at least a few more years. Bosch needed government money for Leuna. A few days after the meeting, Farben deposited four hundred thousand marks into a political fund. Almost all of it went to the Nazi Party.”
― Thomas Hager, The Alchemy of Air: A Jewish Genius, a Doomed Tycoon, and the Scientific Discovery That Fed the World but Fueled the Rise of Hitler

“This was the highest-yield traditional agricultural system ever devised. Using it, the Chinese could feed as many as ten people with the output from each acre of farmland, a yield of food five to ten times higher than the European average of the 1800s.”
― Thomas Hager, The Alchemy of Air: A Jewish Genius, a Doomed Tycoon, and the Scientific Discovery That Fed the World but Fueled the Rise of Hitler

“In the wake of the guano collapse, Peru needed money. It had floated enormous foreign loans on the promise of continued guano production; by the late 1860s Peru was one of the world’s largest debtor nations. It needed whatever it could make out of nitrates as quickly as possible.”
― Thomas Hager, The Alchemy of Air: A Jewish Genius, a Doomed Tycoon, and the Scientific Discovery That Fed the World but Fueled the Rise of Hitler

“Drug misuse is not a disease, it is a decision, like the decision to step in front of a moving car. You would call that not a disease, but an error of judgment.”
― Thomas Hager, Ten Drugs: How Plants, Powders, and Pills Have Shaped the History of Medicine

“In the early 1920s, virtually every expert was predicting that the world was about to run out of oil.”
― Thomas Hager, The Alchemy of Air: A Jewish Genius, a Doomed Tycoon, and the Scientific Discovery That Fed the World but Fueled the Rise of Hitler

“Lise Meitner”
― Thomas Hager, The Alchemy of Air: A Jewish Genius, a Doomed Tycoon, and the Scientific Discovery That Fed the World but Fueled the Rise of Hitler

“The motivation behind the enormous investment in the [Rockefeller Foundation’s] new agenda was to develop the human sciences as a comprehensive explanatory and applied framework of social control grounded in the natural, medical, and social sciences.”
― Thomas Hager, Ten Drugs: How Plants, Powders, and Pills Have Shaped the History of Medicine

“A more personal way of gauging the impact of Haber-Bosch is to look at your own body. About half the nitrogen in you came out of a Haber-Bosch factory. Don’t worry: Nitrogen is nitrogen, the atoms in Haber-Bosch ammonia are precisely the same as the atoms in the best natural manure, and they all come, one way or another, from the air you breathe—but half the nitrogen in your blood, your skin and hair, your proteins and DNA, is synthetic.”
― Thomas Hager, The Alchemy of Air: A Jewish Genius, a Doomed Tycoon, and the Scientific Discovery That Fed the World but Fueled the Rise of Hitler

“It kept Germany in the war. Some historians have estimated that World War I would have ended a year, perhaps two years sooner, if Haber-Bosch had not been able to make the nitrates needed for explosives.”
― Thomas Hager, The Alchemy of Air: A Jewish Genius, a Doomed Tycoon, and the Scientific Discovery That Fed the World but Fueled the Rise of Hitler

“I would call that field of play--the place in which humans test their natural limits and often break them--science.”
― Thomas Hager, The Alchemy of Air: A Jewish Genius, a Doomed Tycoon, and the Scientific Discovery That Fed the World but Fueled the Rise of Hitler

“Quality-of-life drugs that treat symptoms can be prescribed endlessly; if a patient stops taking them, the symptoms return. So they make money endlessly. Given the high costs of drug development, it’s easy to understand why drugmakers want that kind of payoff. The need for profit skews the kinds of drugs that are developed. It explains why drugmakers are putting very little effort into finding desperately needed new antibiotics and a lot of money into finding drugs that can treat the symptoms of aging.”
― Thomas Hager, Ten Drugs: How Plants, Powders, and Pills Have Shaped the History of Medicine

“there are only so many targets for drugs in the body (around eight thousand potential places for drugs to work, by one estimate),”
― Thomas Hager, Ten Drugs: How Plants, Powders, and Pills Have Shaped the History of Medicine

“Sanger and McCormick had been battling for decades against all the “Comstockery” that followed, a lawmaking passion at the state and local level for wiping out all forms of immoral and obscene behavior. Comstockery banned the sale of contraceptives in twenty-two states. Comstockery made it illegal in thirty states to run advertisements about birth control. In Massachusetts, where Pincus was doing his research, Comstockery meant that giving a single contraceptive pill to a woman could result in a $1,000 fine or five years in prison. And Comstockery meant you couldn’t perform human tests of birth control in the United States.”
― Thomas Hager, Ten Drugs: How Plants, Powders, and Pills Have Shaped the History of Medicine

“Still, the demand for their products is so great that Haber-Bosch plants today consume 1 percent of all the energy on earth, and the largest factories produce so much ammonia that it has to be transported in pipelines (one of the first ammonia pipelines in the United States, built in the late 1960s, for instance, runs from the plant in Texas to the corn fields of Iowa). This huge, almost invisible industry is feeding the world. Without these plants, somewhere between two billion and three billion people—about 40 percent of the world’s population—would starve to death.”
― Thomas Hager, The Alchemy of Air: A Jewish Genius, a Doomed Tycoon, and the Scientific Discovery That Fed the World but Fueled the Rise of Hitler

“their work was a way to understand the workings of the divine.”
― Thomas Hager, The Alchemy of Air: A Jewish Genius, a Doomed Tycoon, and the Scientific Discovery That Fed the World but Fueled the Rise of Hitler

“empyrean”
― Thomas Hager, The Alchemy of Air: A Jewish Genius, a Doomed Tycoon, and the Scientific Discovery That Fed the World but Fueled the Rise of Hitler

“IN 1897, AFTER more than a decade and a half of research and an investment of eighteen million gold marks—an amount by some estimates equal to the total value of BASF—Brunck’s chemists finally made synthetic indigo in bulk.”
― Thomas Hager, The Alchemy of Air: A Jewish Genius, a Doomed Tycoon, and the Scientific Discovery That Fed the World but Fueled the Rise of Hitler

“The higher civilization rises, the viler man becomes.”
― Thomas Hager, The Alchemy of Air: A Jewish Genius, a Doomed Tycoon, and the Scientific Discovery That Fed the World but Fueled the Rise of Hitler

“In the end, no one knew what caused madness.”
― Thomas Hager, Ten Drugs: How Plants, Powders, and Pills Have Shaped the History of Medicine

“The need was so great that in 1856 the U.S. Congress passed the Guano Islands Act, which allowed any U.S. citizen to lay claim to any deserted guano island anywhere in the world and make it U.S. territory. The”
― Thomas Hager, The Alchemy of Air: A Jewish Genius, a Doomed Tycoon, and the Scientific Discovery That Fed the World but Fueled the Rise of Hitler

“About a third of the sale price of every ton of guano went into the treasury of Peru, a flow of income that by 1859 accounted for three-quarters of the nation’s national budget.”
― Thomas Hager, The Alchemy of Air: A Jewish Genius, a Doomed Tycoon, and the Scientific Discovery That Fed the World but Fueled the Rise of Hitler