The World’s Greatest Fix: A History of Nitrogen and Agriculture

430 Pages·2004·1.99 MB·English

by  Leigh

THE WORLD’S
GREATEST FIX
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THE WORLD’S
GREATEST FIX
A History of Nitrogen and
Agriculture
G. J. LEIGH
2004
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Oxford New York
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Copyright © 2004 by Oxford University Press, Inc.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Leigh, G. J.
The world’s greatest fix : a history of nitrogen and agriculture
/ G. J. Leigh.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references
ISBN 0-19-516582-9
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1. Nitrogen fertilizers—History. I. Title.
S651.L55 2004
631.8′4—dc22 2003021366
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To Amelia for all her patience and support, and to Daniel and
Hannah, who should never cease to ask why
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PREFACE
Most of my professional life, for about thirty years, was
concerned with the chemistry of nitrogen fixation. My
involvement began in early 1965 when I received a letter
from Joseph Chatt asking me whether I would care to apply
for a position in the new Unit of Nitrogen Fixation, which by
then had just settled at the first of what was then the latest
generation of British universities, at Brighton in Sussex. This
Unit was funded by the then Agricultural Research Council
(ARC), and its remit was to discover the mechanism of
biological nitrogen fixation. This had been perplexing
scientists for about 100 years.
The intention was to explain how it was possible for bacteria
living in temperate or tropical environments to mobilise
atmospheric nitrogen when industrially this seemed to require
catalysts, temperatures of the order of 400 degrees
Centigrade, and pressures of some hundreds of atmospheres.
The Unit assembled a multi-disciplinary group of scientists,
ranging from inorganic chemists to microbiologists. The Unit
developed rapidly, both in size and in the scope of its
activities. In time it became a unique establishment where
scientists of many different kinds were able to talk to each
other, and even to understand one another. Visiting scientists
came from all over the world in order to experience the
unique atmosphere of the laboratory, the foremost in the
world. For 30 years a stream of innovative, fundamental
discoveries poured from its researches.
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It was only towards the end of this period that the funding
authorities began to question the value of this research. In the
initial stages, the attitude of the ARC was very relaxed: here
they had in the Unit some good chaps doing good work, many
acknowledged as world authorities, producing a wide
range of new knowledge, from inorganic chemistry to
biochemistry, molecular biology, and bacterial physiology.
During the 1980s and 1990s this laissez-faire attitude
changed. The successors to the ARC asked questions about
the economic benefits and agricultural applications of our
work. It has to be admitted that these were very few, not only
from the work in Brighton but also from nitrogen fixation
work anywhere else in the world. The Sussex laboratory was
wound down and disappeared during the decade of the 1990s.
It goes without saying that I personally regretted this change,
and I believe that my opinion is due only in part to my
advancing age. In the current world, knowledge is rarely
valued for itself, and much more often for its commercial
potential. Nevertheless, for nearly 30 years my colleagues and
I had the immense privilege of studying a challenging
problem with a minimum of bureaucratic interference. During
this time, I became aware that we were all members of a long
line of investigators that stretched back for thousands of
years. Each of us saw the problem of soil fertility, expressed
for us as the conundrum of biological nitrogen fixation, in a
different way, and each of us added a small brick to the
imposing edifice that is modern agricultural science. What I
have attempted to show in this book is how human beings
have solved the problems relating to soil fertility using
imagination, ingenuity, and an understanding of how the
world works. I also discovered that the story of this work is
not just a dry retailing of scientific facts and discoveries. It
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also shows those involved as real human beings with all the
faults, sometimes considerable, of human beings, including
jealousy, greed, and even war. This book is dedicated to all of
them: maybe their names are beyond recall, but their work
remains, with wise use to the benefit of all humankind.
We do not yet know how biological nitrogen fixation works at
the atomic level. I used to think that with the knowledge of
nitrogen chemistry accumulated by inorganic chemists, then,
once we knew the structure of typical nitrogenase enzymes,
we could simply extrapolate from the chemistry to the
structure and say: that’s how it works. We now have all this
information, and it is still not obvious how nitrogenases work.
Nature is more complex than we imagined. Nevertheless, I
hope that this book will show the general reader how
challenging, rewarding, and beautiful is science, and will
convince them of the vital importance that even lay people
should have informed opinions about the impact of science on
society. I also hope that the book will stimulate a new
generation of researchers to take up the challenge of
understanding the beautiful world of biological and chemical
science. The benefits to the individuals involved and to
human knowledge will be immense. The economic benefits
may not yet be evident or measurable, but they are bound, in
the course of time, to be considerable.
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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I would like to acknowledge the unstinting help of the
individuals and institutions listed below. Without their
assistance, this book would not have been possible. Any
errors in the text are my responsibility alone. I have tried
correctly to acknowledge and respect all my sources and
copyright obligations, both in the text and in the list below,
and I apologise if I have inadvertently ignored or
misrepresented anything or anyone.
American Cancer Society
American Geographical Society
Dr. S. Becker, BASF Unternehmensarchiv, Ludwigshafen,
Germany
Professor R. A. Berner, Yale University, New Haven CT,
USA
Professor O. Bøckmann, Norsk Hydro A/S, Porsgrunn,
Norway
Bodleian Library, Oxford, UK
Brighton and Hove Local Studies Library, Brighton, UK
British Association for the Advancement of Science
British Museum, London, UK
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