Two historically and morally appalling first sentences in a scientific paper.

[NNadir]

This evening, as the weekend dies down, I came across this paper in one of my favorite scientific journals:

Production of Cyanide Using Thermal Plasma: Thermodynamic Analysis and Process-Specific Energy Consumption (Luke Henderson, Pradeep Shukla, Victor Rudolph, and Geoff Duckworth Industrial & Engineering Chemistry Research 2020 59 (49), 21347-21358)

The text of the full paper begins with these two sentances.

Plasma reactors first found applications for industrial chemical synthesis in 1940, when Chemische Werke Huels in Marl, Germany, began producing acetylene from light hydrocarbons.(1) This stimulated interest in plasma reactions for industrial chemicals including cyanide...

In 1940, Nazi Germany had just conquered Poland, and was beginning to develop the technology for the industrial murder of the Jews, the Holocaust, ultimately settling on a product called "Zyklon B," hydrogen cyanide.

Now, it is true that Chemische Werke Hüls, was charged with making synthetic rubber, not cyanide - US bombers converted their synthetic rubber plant to dust in 1943 - but still...

One hopes the authors wrote these dreadfully juxtaposed sentences obliviously; one would not want to consider it deliberate. Still...still...

For the record, Zyklon B was manufactured by a company known as Degesch managed by Degussa, a business unit of IG Farben, a company founded, as its name implies, originally to make pretty dyes for the textile industry.

Still...still...

It is an unfortunate choice of words, and strikes me as offensive. Some scientific papers disturb me, for instance the plethora of them about distributing lead based perovskites to be put on people's roofs to make them "green," but I seldom find papers offensive.

I would not appeal to Nazi Germany to give historical perspective on the production of cyanide.

[LearnedHand]

1. Horrible to see normalization of atrocities in science

Intended or not. It is horrific to speak of sparking interest in industrial chemicals in such a cheery tone, much like the voice-overs in those high school chemistry films.

[NutmegYankee]

2. Zyklon was an existing product used as a pesticide from the 1920s.

Even today. modern pesticides are extremely poisonous, with some such as malathion similar chemically to other organophosphates like Sarin Nerve Gas.

The Nazis took the exisiting product, removed the warning agents (bitters and smells) and renamed it Zyklon B.

[NNadir]

3. I know. I just read on Wikipedia that the concentration camps...

..."only" represented 8% of the profits the company made in 1943.

It is true that many pesticides are organophosphates, but then again, so are "green" modern flame retardants, designed to replace dangerous and persistent polybrominated ether flame retardants.

Then again, AMP, ADP and ATP, on which the existence of life depends are also organophosphates.

[NutmegYankee]

4. I read those sentences and see no malice.

The fact that the German chemical industry invented the process and the fact that cyanide was used for many legitimate industrial processes led to those sentences. I might tend to be forgiving because of my engineering background where people tend to focus on technical aspects and not on social concerns. At least not in scientific and engineering discussions.

I don't know if the process he is describing was used for Zyklon B.

[NNadir]

5. There have been a lot of discussions, particularly in the last year in the Journals Nature and...

...and Science, that scientists in particular do need to think about the social implications connected with their work.

I do believe that this juxtaposition was unintentional - at least I hope so - but it is nonetheless unfortunate.

Perhaps the authors don't know anything about the history of the last century.

It pretty much follows from the fact that I read scientific journals that I am a scientist, and have participated in tens of thousands, if not more, scientific conversations, and generally they are not about social issues, although many papers begin with a rationalization of how a product might impact social and environmental and other non-scientific topics.

I think it a poor choice to have begun this way.