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In 1770, the German chemist Carl Wilhelm Scheele performed an experiment and noticed that he’d created a noxious gas. He named it “dephlogisticated muriatic acid.” We know it today as chlorine.
Two centuries later, another German chemist, Fritz Haber, invented a process to synthesize and mass-produce ammonia, which revolutionized agriculture by generating the modern fertilizer industry. He won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1918. But that same research, combined with Scheele’s earlier discovery, helped create the chemical-weapons program that Germany used in World War I. This is an example of what’s known as the “dual-use dilemma,” in which scientific and technological research is intended for good, but can also, either intentionally or accidentally, be used for harm.
In both chemistry and physics, the dual-use dilemma has long been a concern, and it has led to international treaties limiting the most worrisome applications of problematic research. Because of the Convention on the Prohibition of the Development, Production, Stockpiling and Use of Chemical Weapons and on Their Destruction (otherwise known as the Chemical Weapons Convention, or CWC), a treaty signed by 130 countries, many dangerous chemicals that are sometimes used in scientific or medical research have to be monitored and inspected.
One example is ricin, which is produced naturally in castor seeds and is lethal to humans in the tiniest amounts. A brief exposure in a mist or a few grains of powder can be fatal, so it is on the CWC list. Triethanolamine, which is used to treat ear infections and impacted earwax, and is an ingredient to thicken face creams and balance the pH of shaving foams, is listed as well because it can also be used to manufacture hydrazoic acid, otherwise known as mustard gas.
