Fritz Haber

Fritz Jakob Haber, born 9 December 1868, was a German chemist whose invention of the Haber process - synthesizing ammonia from nitrogen and hydrogen - won him the 1918 Nobel Prize in Chemistry and now supports roughly a third of global food production. A known German nationalist, he turned his mind to war during World War I, pioneering chlorine gas as a weapon to break trench deadlock at the Second Battle of Ypres, earning him the title "father of chemical warfare." His work was later adapted, without his involvement, into Zyklon B, the pesticide used to kill over a million Jews in Holocaust gas chambers. After the Nazis rose to power in 1933, Haber resigned and accepted an offer from Chaim Weizmann to lead the Sieff Research Institute in Mandatory Palestine, but he died of heart failure in a Basel hotel on 29 January 1934, aged 65, never reaching his destination.