That’s where I first heard about him. Thanks, Spotify. I’ve learned more about European history from Sabaton and Iron Maiden than I have from school.

Someone else mention Borlaug in this thread, and it shows how no single person necessarily changed anything on their own, and how it’s difficult to put all the success as the result of a single person. Borlaug’s success was only possible by building on Haber’s work, just like Haber worked with Carl Bosch to accomplish what he did, and so on.

Seven Billion Humans: The World Fritz Haber Made

Haber therefore revolutionized the entire course of world history. The transformation of Asia and the emergence of China and India as giant, modern 21st-century global economies would never have been possible without Norman Borlaug’s miracle rice strains. But they could never have been grown had Haber not “extracted bread from air,” as his fellow Nobel laureate Max von Laue put it. Borlaug’s “miracle” strains of rice and grain require exceptionally vast inputs of the nitrate fertilizer that is still made from the process Fritz Haber discovered.

These fertilizers also require enormous inputs of oil. This means the dream of an oil-free world can never happen. Even if eternal, ever-renewable free energy could be harnessed from the sun or the cosmic currents of space, a world of seven billion people would still be desperately dependent on oil to make the nitrate fertilizer to grow the crops those people need to survive. The 21st century, like the 20th century, therefore, will still be Fritz Haber’s world.