Today's Wisdom - Haber, Doping and Descartes

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By the turn of the 20th century, the world was quietly closing in on a hard biological ceiling. Every crop grown in every field on earth depends on nitrogen to survive, yet despite nitrogen making up 78 percent of the atmosphere, plants have no way to absorb it in that gaseous form. For centuries the gap had been filled by manure, guano harvested from remote Pacific islands, and sodium nitrate deposits mined from the Chilean desert. These were finite sources, and scientists were beginning to calculate how long they had left. German chemist Fritz Haber cracked the problem in 1909 by finding a way to pull nitrogen directly from the air and force it to react with hydrogen under extreme heat and pressure. This produced ammonia, the compound at the base of synthetic fertilizer. BASF engineer Carl Bosch then took that laboratory reaction and rebuilt it as an industrial process capable of operating at a scale that could feed nations. The Haber-Bosch process that emerged from their combined work now produces around 150 million metric tons of ammonia annually which supports roughly half the global population's food supply.

The same chemistry that fed billions also prolonged a world war. When Britain's naval blockade cut Germany off from Chilean nitrates at the outbreak of World War One, the Haber-Bosch process filled the gap, keeping Germany's ammunition and explosives supply running for years. Most military historians believe the war was significantly extended as a direct result. Haber also proposed and personally supervised the first large-scale chemical weapons attack in modern warfare, orchestrating the release of 168 tons of chlorine gas over Allied trenches at Ypres in April 1915. His wife Clara Immerwahr, the first woman to receive a doctorate in chemistry in Germany, had pleaded with him repeatedly to stop, denouncing the program publicly as a perversion of the ideals of science. On the night of May 1st she walked into the garden with his army pistol and shot herself through the heart.

Haber received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1918, a decision so controversial that several prominent scientists refused to attend the ceremony or shake his hand. The Nobel Committee acknowledged his chemical weapons work directly but concluded that his ammonia synthesis had conferred the greatest benefit on mankind. Haber spent his later years in a final irony that history seemed to arrange deliberately. A German Jewish convert to Christianity who had spent decades performing patriotic service to his country, he was stripped of his position and forced to flee Germany when the Nazis came to power in 1933. The most grotesque footnote to his story arrived after his death. A pesticide developed at his own institute was later modified into Zyklon B, the compound the Nazi regime used to murder millions in the death camps, among them members of his own family.

The inaugural Enhanced Games took place on Sunday inside a purpose-built $50 million arena erected in a Las Vegas casino parking lot. The premise was simple and deliberately confrontational: a multi-sport competition in athletics, swimming, and weightlifting where athletes are not just permitted to use performance-enhancing drugs but encouraged to. Testosterone, growth hormone, anabolic steroids, and peptides were all permitted, covering most of the pharmacological arsenal that has defined doping scandals in conventional sport for decades. Winners took home $250,000 per event, with a $1 million bonus for breaking a world record. The founders believe that performance enhancement already runs through elite sport, practiced in secret and without medical oversight, and that transparency makes it both more honest and safer.

The headline result was Greek swimmer Kristian Gkolomeev, a 32-year-old who had competed in four Olympics without reaching a podium and finished fifth in the 50m freestyle at Paris 2024. After signing up with the Enhanced Games in early 2025 and beginning a supervised program of banned substances, Gkolomeev swam 20.81 seconds in the 50m freestyle at the Las Vegas event, breaking the official world record of 20.88 set by Australia's Cameron McEvoy in March 2025. British Olympic silver medallist Ben Proud won the 50m butterfly, posting a time faster than his personal best but narrowly missing the world record. Hafþór Björnsson, who played The Mountain in Game of Thrones and holds the deadlift world record of 501kg set in 2020, competed in weightlifting but was unable to surpass his own mark. Of the 42 athletes competing, the majority used performance-enhancing substances, and organizers reported 13 personal bests across the event, though only Gkolomeev's time exceeded an official world record.

The response from the established sporting world has been uniformly hostile. World Aquatics banned any athlete who participates in or publicly supports the Enhanced Games from its competitions, calling the event a circus built on shortcuts. The IOC and WADA described it as immoral and a dangerous and irresponsible concept, while World Athletics president Lord Coe said any athlete who took part was moronic. The medical concerns underlying those condemnations are not trivial. Long-term use of testosterone and anabolic steroids carries well-documented risks including cardiovascular damage, hormonal disruption, and psychological effects. The deeper question the event forces into the open is one that conventional sport has never satisfactorily answered: given that the line between permitted and banned enhancement has always been somewhat arbitrary, drawn around specific substances while allowing altitude training, hypoxic tents, and cutting-edge biomechanical interventions, what exactly is the principle being protected? The governing bodies say it is human health and fair competition. The Enhanced Games say those same bodies have simply decided where the line sits and called it ethics.

For centuries, scholars had built their entire understanding of the world on two foundations: the authority of the Bible and the philosophy of Aristotle. Descartes decided to demolish both and start from nothing. His method was radical in its simplicity: doubt absolutely everything that can possibly be doubted (your own senses, the physical world around you, mathematics) and see what, if anything, remains standing. He arrived to the conclusion that if he was being deceived, something had to exist to be deceived. The very act of doubting proved that a doubter was present. Everything else could be an illusion, but the fact that he was thinking could not be.

From that one certainty, Descartes rebuilt his entire picture of reality. The most consequential thing he constructed was mind-body dualism, the idea that a human being consists of two entirely different substances somehow sharing a life. The body is a physical machine, governed by the laws of nature, no different in kind from a clock or a pump. The mind is something else entirely, a non-physical thinking substance with no size, weight, or location. Descartes believed the two interacted through the pineal gland, a small structure at the centre of the brain. He could never satisfactorily explain how a non-physical mind moves a physical body, and neither, four centuries later, can anyone else. But the distinction mattered enormously in practice. By separating the study of the physical world from questions about the soul, Descartes gave science permission to investigate nature without immediately colliding with the Church.

The implications of Descartes' work extended well beyond philosophy. His development of the Cartesian coordinate system, the grid of x and y axes still used in every mathematics classroom on Earth, came directly from his belief that geometry and algebra were two languages describing the same underlying reality. The broader legacy of his method, the insistence that knowledge must be built from the ground up on foundations that survive rigorous doubt, shaped every major philosophical movement that followed him. The deepest challenge his work leaves behind is the one he never solved: if the mind and body are truly separate substances, how do they connect?

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Until next time... A Little Wiser Team