AI alignment - I of V

AI is constantly in the news. More and more of the world is being turned over to various mathematical and computational models. Though they range widely in complexity, they are steadily replacing both human judgment and explicitly programmed software of the more traditional variety. Some do really cool things like discovering new molecules for medicine and some do really dark things like that AI meal planner app proposing a crowd-pleasing recipe featuring chlorine gas.

AI doesn’t mean one thing. There are chatbots, whose function is to output plausible looking text. You have image generators, whose function is to create images based on text input. Similarly for video generators. There are also systems designed to play games like chess or Go. There are systems designed to map from sequences of amino acids to predicted structures of the folded protein. There are systems that are designed to determine what goes into algorithmic feeds. 

When you open Google Maps, call Alexa or book an Uber you are dealing with a form of AI. The content on your social feeds or the ads that you that are targeted at you using AI. When you try to get a loan from a bank, you are screened by AI. What price you pay for your home, or your car insurance, are decided by AI. When you are interviewing for a job, your face and responses may be analysed by AI. 

What all of these things do have in common is that they are the result of doing statistical processing over large data sets. But the input data that's used to create the systems are different. The kind of statistical patterns that are being mapped are different. Just saying "AI" gives the impression that there's one thing out there and it knows "about the shape of folded proteins", and also about "how to play chess", and it knows the answer to whatever question you might put into the chatbot. That makes it seem like it's one super intelligent entity when it's actually a bunch of separate software programs designed by different people, trained on different data for different purposes. 

There was a time when most artificial intelligence was programmed by computer scientists. And then scientists figured out how to get AI to learn how to do what we instructed it to do but we still would provide them with the instructions that define the goal of the AI model. In other words, they got a digital computer to improve of its own accord. By developing machines that could learn by human instruction or their own experience, they removed the need for programming.

This gave rise to a new issue, the alignment problem viz. whether the AI is reaching its intended goal or giving some unintended result. In the last five years or so, these fears have started coming to life. We are living in a world full of examples of this - image recognition software that captioned a selfie of two black Americans as "gorillas", or  self-driving cars that fail to identify jaywalking pedestrians and end up causing fatal collisions. Broadly, we can think of a machine learning system as having two halves. Each of these halves offers an opportunity for things to become misaligned: 

1. There is the training data, the set of examples from which the system learns. The AI is then at the mercy of the examples from which it is taught. If a certain type of data is underrepresented or absent from the training data but present in the real world, then things will go wrong. 
2. The objective function, which is how we are going to mathematically define success in each of those examples. It basically tells them what we want it to do. 

Take the 2018 crash of the Uber car that killed a pedestrian in Arizona. The system was built on an object classification system that had a very rigid set of categories that included pedestrian, cyclist, debris, etc. and had thousands of examples of each of those things. The system did not have any training data of jaywalkers so it was unprepared to encounter someone crossing a road not at a crosswalk. But this particular woman was walking a bicycle across the street, which was something that the system had never seen causing a fatal crash. The model is only as good as what data was put into it.

Ethics and Modern gene therapy - IV of IV

If CRISPR became a standard tool in fertility clinics, people might lose their suspicions of it — just as people lost their suspicions of in vitro fertilization in the 1980s. Before long, people might be willing to entertain a new use for CRISPR. Doctors might edit beneficial changes into an embryo’s genes. Parents could give their children all the advantages that scientists have found in our species’ genetic variations. 

Since there are always advances in science, parents might postpone having children in the hope that new variations may be found which will give their children better advantages. This will make decisions about when to have children seem the same way as how people wait to buy a phone until a new model is released. The ethicist Robert Sparrow argues that this might lead to a sense of genetic inferiority for earlier generations. He wonders if future generations might find themselves stuck in an “enhanced rat race.”

As is always the case, the problem is the system. If success depends on intelligence, and intelligence can be engineered, then parents feel morally compelled to enhance their children. Parents genetically enhance their children out of love but that love becomes entangled with fear and competition. Some children will suffer or die but they will reason that it is the price of staying competitive. Merit stops being “fair” and becomes biologically rigged from the start. Ethical boundaries shift easily when success is at stake. The most dangerous futures aren’t imposed — they’re gradually accepted. Over time, what once seemed extreme becomes “just how things are.”

This might lead to unfamiliar legal territory. A few cases have been brought by children in the US against their parents for allowing them to be born with congenital diseases. According to these “wrongful life” lawsuits, the parents were negligent for ignoring tests on the fetus before birth and going ahead with it anyway. Some ethicists now wonder if children in the future may sue their parents for not using the latest genetic engineering engineering techniques thereby putting them at a disadvantage with respect to future generations 

In The Case Against Perfection, Michael Sandel, an American political philosopher, argues against enhancement. He says that if bioengineering made the myth of the "self-made man" come true, it would be difficult to view our talents as gifts for which we are indebted, rather than as achievements for which we are responsible. What would be lost if biotechnology dissolved our sense of giftedness? This would make us less likely to view our traits as a matter of chance. He writes: 

A lively sense of the contingency of our gifts — a consciousness that none of us is wholly responsible for his or her success - saves a meritocratic society from sliding into the smug assumption that the rich are rich because they are more deserving than the poor. Without this, the successful would become even more likely than they are now to view themselves as self-made and self-sufficient, and hence wholly responsible for their success. Those at the bottom of society would be viewed not as disadvantaged, and thus worthy of a measure of compensation, but as simply unfit, and thus worthy of eugenic repair. The meritocracy, less chastened by chance, would become harder, less forgiving.

He gives an example of the real world consequences. Consider insurance. Since people do not know how their fate will pan out, they pool their risk by buying health insurance and life insurance. The actual result is that, over time, the healthy wind up subsidizing the unhealthy, and those who live to a ripe old age wind up subsidizing the families of those who die early. What ends up happening is that that people pool their risks and resources and share one another's fate.

But insurance markets work properly only as long as people do not know or control their own risk factors. Suppose genetic testing advanced to the point where it could reliably predict each person's medical future and life expectancy. Those confident of good health and long life would opt out of the pool, causing other people's premiums to skyrocket. The insurance market will collapse as perfect generic knowledge ends up separating those with good genes from the company of those with bad ones.

One important ethical issue is that the use of such technologies will support ongoing inequalities among military parties. CRISPR is currently an expensive technology. Some developed countries might think of using this technology to further strengthen their defenses and even attack underdeveloped or developing countries. The US military started a program called Safe Genes to gene modify organisms to be used in battle and anti-CRISPR tools to disable bio-weapons. This situation could cause a constant tension, making it difficult to provide an environment of peace and stability worldwide. 

There is yet another aspect of the genetic editing of microorganisms to consider, as CRISPR could also be used to synthesize and manipulate pathogens, including smallpox, the Spanish flu virus, avian H5N1 flu virus, and SARS. Anyone with the appropriate equipment could engineer a vaccine-resistant flu virus or invasive species in a crude laboratory. Bio-terrorists might use it to turn common microbes into a pathogenic weapon.

I heard of an economics professor who was teaching macroeconomics (I think it was  Gregory Mankiw). He told the students (quoting from memory), ‘Both of us are confused. The only difference is that you are naively confused and I am profoundly confused.’ After this brief discussion about CRSPER ethics, I hope you are profoundly confused.

"May you live in interesting times" is an English expression that is claimed to be a translation of a traditional Chinese curse. The expression is ironic: "interesting" times are usually times of trouble. With climate change, AI, and CRISPR, 2050 promises to be very interesting indeed, perhaps more interesting than anyone had bargained for. (2050 seems to be too far in the future but it is a nice number!)

Ethics and Modern gene therapy - III of IV

There are some genes that have both positive and negative effects in different contexts. For example, researchers now suspect that people who carry one copy of the mutated gene that causes cystic fibrosis (which requires two copies) have an increased defense against tuberculosis. Even gene variants implicated in neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer’s may have benefits, such as improved cognitive function and better working memory in young adults. What decisions would you make? 

Schizophrenia, depression, and bipolar disorder can be brutal, often deadly. While trying to eliminate similar disorders, we should consider whether there might be some cost to society, even to civilization. A reason that scientists will not eliminate conditions such as psychiatric disorders or conditions such as autism is that some of the risk for these disorders almost certainly comes in trade for small competitive advantages, such as heightened sensitivity, concentration, or openness to experience.

A study showed a 77 percent rate of psychiatric disorders in eminent fiction writers. Writers are 10 times, and poets 40 times, more likely to be bipolar than the general population. Vincent van Gogh had either schizophrenia or bipolar disorder. So did the mathematician John Nash. People with bipolar disorder include Ernest Hemingway, Mariah Carey, Francis Ford Coppola, Graham Greene, Sylvia Plath, Edgar Allan Poe, and hundreds of other artists and creators. 

To what extent does dealing with mood swings, fantasies, delusions, compulsions, mania, and deep depression help spur, in some people, creativity and artistry? Would you cure your own child from being schizophrenic if you knew that, if you didn’t, he would become a Vincent van Gogh? We have to face the potential conflict between what is desired by the individual versus what is good for human civilization. 

A reduction in mood disorders would be seen as a benefit when seen from the point of view of an individual and as a cost when seen from the point of view of society. As we learn to treat mood disorders with drugs and eventually with genetic editing, will we have more happiness but fewer Hemingways? Do we wish to live in a world in which there are no Van Goghs? But what moral right do we have to require another family to forgo a desired genetic intervention simply for the sake of adding to the diversity of society? 

Decisions about genetic editing are likely to be driven by consumer choice and the persuasive power of marketing. Initially people will think that if we can do so safely, why shouldn’t we prevent abnormalities, diseases, and disabilities? That sounds reasonable and morally justified but it might prove to be a slippery slope. They will naturally start thinking: Why not improve our capabilities and create enhancements - changes in which DNA is altered not to correct a harmful gene variant but to provide some type of genetic advantage, perhaps high intelligence or athletic abilities. (Of course, there is a limit to what enhancements will be possible or safe to attempt.)

While thinking about correcting disabilities, we should keep one factor in mind: to what extent they are inherently disabling and to what extent the disadvantage is due to our social constructs and prejudices. The disadvantages from being deaf, for a human or any other animal, are very real. In contrast, any disadvantages to being gay or Black are due to social attitudes that can and should be changed. That is why we can make a moral distinction between using genetic techniques to prevent deafness and using these techniques to influence such things as skin color and sexual orientation.

Then comes the question of super-enhancements.  These are traits and capacities that exceed what any human has ever had.  Suppose people can choose for their kids to have super-eyesight? What about adding the capacity to see infrared light or some new color? DARPA, the Pentagon’s research agency, already has a project going to study how to create genetically enhanced soldiers.

For example, genetic enhancement may be possible for improving memory. Scientists have managed to manipulate a memory-linked gene in fruit flies. They have produced smart mice by inserting extra copies of a memory-related gene into mouse embryos and the improvement was passed on to offspring. Human memory is more complicated. Should research in this area be allowed? But the natural instinct of scientists is to pioneer procedures and make discoveries. If a nation imposes too many. restrictions, its scientists will move elsewhere and pursue the research. 

Since the wealthy would be able to afford the procedure more often, and since any beneficial genetic modifications made to an embryo would be transmitted to all of that person’s offspring, linkages between class and genetics would keep growing from one generation to the next, no matter how small the disparity in access might be. Consider the effect this could have on the socioeconomic fabric of society. The co-discoverer of CRISPR, Jennifer Doudna says, 

We could create a gene gap that would get wider with each new generation...If you think we face inequalities now, imagine what it would be like if society became genetically tiered along economic lines and we transcribed our financial inequality into our genetic code.

This may also create a different kind of injustice. Using gene editing to “fix” things like deafness or obesity could create a less inclusive society, one that pressures everyone to be the same. Part of what makes our species unique, and our society so strong, is its diversity. A fear is that gene editing will increase existing prejudices against people who fall outside a narrow range of genetic norms. 

Ethics and Modern gene therapy - II of IV

There can be various technical difficulties in producing designer babies. Thousands of genetic variations can influence complex traits, psychiatric risk, personality traits, and capacities such as human intelligence. Take any given genetic variant. None has more than a fraction of a single percentage point of an effect on the risk for a psychiatric disorder or condition. 

Each of the variants in our genes can have enhancing or diminishing effects on other genes depending on the context in which they are inherited. Genetic variants may be deleterious in some cell types, such as neurons, but advantageous in other cell types, such as immune cells. A lot of scientific evidence shows that chronic stress and poverty contribute to alterations in brain circuitry and blood pressure, dramatically influencing health and mortality.

A gene often has three or four different functions, so altering a single gene may have three or four effects. A gene that builds a protein named “protein S” is a blood coagulant, but it was recently shown to have a critical role in regulation of the immune system. The opposite is also true: multiple biological codes or parts can perform the same function. To engineer new systems would require a complete analysis of an entire network, not just a single gene. 

For argument’s sake, let us assume that all these difficulties will be overcome. And we are not talking of the distant future. The time frames being talked about are 15-20 years. If so, what sorts of ethical issues will humanity have to face? In The Code Breaker, Walter Isaacson discusses some thought experiments, which give a flavor of the kinds of questions that we may have to grapple with. 

Sharon Duchesneau and Candy McCullough wanted a sperm donor so they could conceive a kid. That sounds straightforward until you are told that both of them are deaf and lesbians and they wanted a child who is also deaf. They consider their deafness to be part of who they are rather than something to be cured, and they wanted a child who would be part of their cultural identity. So they advertised for a sperm donor who was congenitally deaf. They found one, and now they have a deaf child.

Some people condemned them for making a child disabled intentionally but the deaf community appreciated their action. Where do you stand on this? Should they be praised for preserving a subculture that contributes to the diversity? Would it have been ok if, instead of using a deaf sperm donor, the couple had used pre-implantation diagnosis to select an embryo that had the genetic mutation for deafness? What if they had safely destroyed the child’s eardrums after birth?

Now let us look at gene editing that is done to enhance the traits of our children. The MSTN gene produces a protein that reduces muscle growth when they reach a normal level. Suppress the gene and muscle growth is in overdrive. This has already been done to produce “mighty mice" and cattle with “double muscling". Pushy parents and athletic directors who want champion athletes would be very interested. By performing germline editing, they might produce athletes with bigger bones and stronger muscles. 

When athletes cheat by using steroids, we find it easy to say that they should be banned. But what do we do if athletes' prowess comes from genes they were born with? For example, almost every champion runner has what is known as the R allele of the ACTN3 gene. It produces a protein that builds fast-twitch muscle fibers, and it is also associated with improving strength and recovery from muscle injury.

Someday it may be possible to edit this variation of the ACTN3 gene into the DNA of your kids. Would that be unfair? Does it matter if those genes were paid for by their parents rather than bestowed by a random natural lottery? In future, would we end up admiring the wizardry of the genetic engineers of athletes rather than the diligence of the athletes?

Ethics and Modern gene therapy - I of IV

In Kazuo Ishiguro's novel, Klara and the Sun, the “lifted” are children who have undergone a genetic enhancement procedure designed to increase intelligence and academic ability. It’s something wealthier families choose for their children to secure better futures — elite education, careers, and status. Most top universities in the novel’s world primarily accept lifted students, creating a strong incentive to undergo the process. The parents take this risk in spite of the possibility of the procedure causing illness or even death. Such a dystopian world may not be as far in the future as you might think.  

Genetic engineering has been practiced for five decades. It is the process of altering an organism's genome to change its characteristics in a particular way. It has been used to make food more nutritious, create synthetic insulin and provide promising treatments for illnesses including leukemia and sickle cell disease. Modern gene therapy is being used to treat eye diseases which can cause blindness, promote the growth of healthy skin or add supplementary copies of working genes that fix rare blood or immune system disorders.

Enter CRISPR. Remember the name. I am sure you are dying to know what it stands for so here it is: Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats. CRISPR makes editing genomes much more precise, cheap, and easy than was possible earlier. The technique is considered so significant that the discoverers, Jennifer Doudna and Emmanuelle Charpentier, won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2020, less than a decade after the discovery, something that rarely happens. Biologists began speaking about their life before and after CRISPR.

CRISPR is sold on the internet in kits, and is actively being used to do trivial things, such as to create fluorescent beer. Its ease of use has also raised concerns about “biohackers” who view gene modification as a right and alter microbes and organisms. “Mail-Order Crispr Kits Allow Absolutely Anyone to Hack DNA,” declared the headline of a November 2017 article in Scientific American. The iconoclast scientist Josiah Zayner has used CRISPR to hack into his own genes. (There is a docuseries on Netflix called "Unnatural Selection" where you can see it.)

There are even CRISPR jokes: Why has KFC asked scientists to edit the chicken genome? Because they want something CRISPR. And who is CRISPR's favorite actor? Gene Hackman

So what is the fuss all about? For that, first a little bit of biology. The body contains two types of cells: somatic and germ line cells. Somatic cells refer to any cell of a living organism other than the reproductive cells. The reproductive cells - the egg and the sperm - are called the germ line cells. A germ line cell passes on to the next generation while somatic cells don’t. 

CRISPR is so precise that gene therapy in people with devastating illnesses seems feasible. For example, physicians could directly correct a faulty gene, say, in the blood cells of a patient with sickle-cell anemia. But that kind of gene therapy wouldn’t affect germ cells, and the changes in the DNA wouldn’t get passed to future generations.

In contrast, the genetic changes created by germ-line engineering would be passed on, and that’s what has made the idea seem so objectionable. “Germ line” is biologists’ jargon for the egg and sperm, which combine to form an embryo. By editing the DNA of these cells, it could be possible to correct disease genes and pass those genetic fixes on to future generations. Such a technology could be used to rid families of scourges like cystic fibrosis. 

Germline genome editing leads to many bioethical issues. For example, what to do if the editing leads to occurrence of undesirable changes in the genome? Can parents give informed consent for editing the genomes of unborn children? If not, from whom do you obtain the consent? The counterargument is that parents already make many decisions that affect their future children, including similarly complicated decisions with IVF. Another fear is that germ-line engineering is a path toward a dystopia of superpeople and designer babies for those who can afford it. Want a child with blue eyes and blond hair? Why not design a highly intelligent group of people who could be tomorrow’s leaders and scientists?

Others believe the idea is dubious because it’s not medically necessary. It’s already possible to test the DNA of IVF embryos and pick healthy ones, a process that adds about $4,000 to the cost of a fertility procedure. A man with Huntington’s, for instance, could have his sperm used to fertilize a dozen of his partner’s eggs. Half those embryos would not have the Huntington’s gene, and those could be used to begin a pregnancy.

George Church, a geneticist at Harvard, likes to show a slide on which he lists naturally occurring variants of around 10 genes that, when people are born with them, confer extraordinary qualities or resistance to disease. One makes your bones so hard they’ll break a surgical drill. Another drastically cuts the risk of heart attacks. Church proceeded to tell the audience that he thought changing genes “is going to get to the point where it’s like you are doing the equivalent of cosmetic surgery.”

Regulations about gremline editing are variable and often lack teeth. For example, in many countries like Canada, France, Germany, Brazil, and Australia, clinical interventions in the human germline are expressly prohibited, with criminal sanctions that range from fines to lengthy prison terms. In other countries, such as China, India, and Japan, these interventions are forbidden, but with guidelines that are less enforceable. In the United States, there are no outright bans but any clinical trials would need to receive regulatory approval by the Food and Drug Administration.

There’s a risk that overly restrictive policies in some countries will encourage what might be called CRISPR tourism in others. Patients with means could travel overseas to jurisdictions where regulations are more forgiving or absent altogether. Excessive restrictions on research might lead scientists to continue their experiments behind closed doors. Trying to find a balance between maintaining regulatory environments that permit research and clinical applications but strict enough to prevent the worst excesses would be tough. 

Hypocrisy is not all bad

There is an increasing tendency to accept shocking statements by politicians by just saying that they are being authentic and not hiding behind hypocritical statements. Political leaders used to at least pretend that they are doing the right things some of the time. But Trump has been so successful in making people familiar with the idea of not pretending that they now just shrug their shoulders and say that Trump is being Trump. 

The global system shaped after World War II was built around open markets, human rights, international institutions like United Nations and cooperation and rule-based norms. A large part of the world did not accept it. There were many situations when the system was ignored more than being followed, particularly by the United States itself. But you still had this as the kind of default operating system of the international world.

Whenever the United States did not live up to those principles, it always tried to frame its actions as if it was trying to uphold them. So for example, for the war in Iraq, the Bush administration went to the United Nations, tried to get resolutions, had inspectors put in place, gathered a coalition of 40 plus nations, went to the United States Congress, and then went to war with Iraq. The war may have been misguided, but there was an effort to put it in the context of this larger international order that the United States believed in and was part of.

Now it has gone from being a country that believed in the international system that it had put into place to one that openly violates it. "Openly violates it" is the part that is important. For the current war in Iran, there was no effort to go to the United Nations or to go to Congress. The United States has exactly one ally, Israel. This was deliberate. The Trump administration doesn't believe in any of those features. It wants the unilateral exercise of American power for American national interests as it conceives it to be.

The practice of filling the government with incompetent loyalists has been going on for thousands of years and people know that it will always be there. But some excuse to show that you're doing it for other reasons will generally be given to cover up the actual reason for doing it. But now even this pretense is often not required. Is this a good thing? 

The Oxford English Dictionary tells us that hypocrisy is the “practice of claiming to have moral standards or beliefs to which one’s own behavior does not conform; pretense.”  It is generally viewed as a negative trait; a significant moral failing, especially in a leader. It is often seen as a mark of dishonesty and a lack of authenticity. But it easy to miss the good about hypocrisy - even giving lip service to an ideal that you fall short of maintains the idea that the ideal should remain and people should aspire for it. 

If people were required to perfectly live up to ideals of honesty and compassion at all times for those ideals to exist, there would be no ideals at all. According to Gandhi, there must always be an unbridgeable gulf between the ideal and its practice. The ideal will cease to be one if it becomes possible to realise it. He argues: "Where would there be room for that constant striving, that ceaseless quest after the ideal . . . if mortals could reach the perfect state while still in the body?"

The maxim that 'hypocrisy is the tribute that vice plays to virtue' makes the same point - you're only truly capable of hypocrisy if you're to some degree accepting the importance of certain norms. It's by reference to those norms that you can be called a hypocrite. Hypocrites who fail to keep their promises but refuse to abandon the ideals they betray help keep those standards in place for society to strive toward. The social condemnation of hypocrisy reinforces moral norms and promotes more authentic and accountable behavior in society.

Some situations may require hypocritical behavior in order to reduce tensions in social relations. When citizens appear to conform to the social and cultural conventions and norms of their communities, where their instincts and desires are repressed, they cannot merely be accused of being hypocritical.  Living in a group may require compromise at certain times. When politicians appear hypocritical, they may be performing much better than if they remained steadfast in their consistent adherence to principles. For example, when the leaders of various countries praise Trump to the skies, you know that they are lying but you also know that it is the best way to get a good deal for their countries. 

When a person is accused of hypocrisy, it makes both the charging party and those being charged critically reflect on the action. Trump-style dismissal of any appeal to ethics and virtues, or the belief that such an appeal is inherently in bad faith breeds cynicism and a decline in social standards.  A cynical agreement in society that hypocrisy is a common occurrence and that we are all hypocrites some of the time reduces the effective functioning of a society. 

Anne Applebaum writes that some countries are members of what she calls Autocracy, Inc. - Myanmar, Zimbabwe, Iran,  Cuba, Venezuela, China, Russia etc. They have spent many years disputing the human rights language long used by international institutions. They dismiss treaties and conventions on war and genocide, and concepts such as “civil liberties” and “the rule of law” as embodying Western ideas that don’t apply to them. They feel no shame about the use of open brutality and send hundreds of their citizens to their deaths.

Once upon a time, the leaders of the Soviet Union, the most powerful autocracy in the second half of the twentieth century, cared deeply about how they were perceived around the world. They vigorously promoted the superiority of their political system, and they objected when it was criticized. They at least paid lip service to the aspirational system of norms and treaties set up after World War II, with its language about universal human rights, the laws of war, and the rule of law more generally. Even in the early part of this century, most dictatorships hid their true intentions “behind elaborate, carefully manipulated performances of democracy". But all that pretense is now not required. 

The Overton Window is a model for understanding how ideas in society change over time and influence politics. It was developed in the 1990s by Joseph Overton, a political scientist. The window illustrates the general public’s most acceptable policies in the center and the more untenable policies on the ends. According to the concept, politicians are limited in what policy ideas they can support — they generally only pursue policies that are widely accepted throughout society as legitimate policy options. These policies lie inside the Overton Window. 

Politicians and others in the political arena might shift or expand the span of the Overton window to make specific policies more or less acceptable in public opinion. Politicians of various countries, by their statements and actions over a number of years, have shifted the Overton window towards reduced importance of a number of moral ideas. Anne Applebaum writes in Autocracy Inc.:

This is the core of the problem: the leaders of Autocracy, Inc., know that the language of transparency, accountability, justice, and democracy will always appeal to some of their own citizens. To stay in power they must undermine those ideas, wherever they are found.

Russia and China would not have dreamt that they would have a person in the White House who would do their job for them. They will be content to follow a famous strategic maxim attributed to Napoleon Bonaparte - "Never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake".

Palantir Technologies - IV of IV

Palantir is much beyond a technology story and is a story of security and defense. Counterterrorism and defense form the main part of Palantir’s business. Much of this work necessarily takes place out of public view. A number of military veterans work at Palantir. It personifies the new revolution in military affairs. Alex Karp and cofounder Peter Thiel are now fully embedded in the Trump White House system and are looking for more and more business.

Palantir's work is related to analyzing data from thousands of satellites and other sensors and making sense of that for military commanders. They are also creating a platform that will facilitate the mass deportation of 'illegal immigrants'. Palantir's power, fame and presence is not confined to America or Israel.  All of NATO has embraced it. Palantir's use of AI has been has been criticized as crossing the ethical boundaries, particularly as it works with military intelligence, immigration, etc., probably with not enough disclosure.

Shyam Shankar, Palantir Chief Technology Officer, is a Lieutenant Colonel US army reserve, commissioned in June 2025 to a new unit called the Executive Innovation Corps. He plays a key role in upgrading technologies, particularly AI, for the US armed forces. (Reserve army officers in the US can keep on doing the work that they are doing, but they are part of the army as officers, which means they have got the privileges like security clearances, etc. Chief Technology Officers of three big tech companies have been appointed as officers.)

There are more indications about how deeply embedded Palantir has now become in the security and defense structure in America. Jacob Helberg, ex-Palantir, has been appointed under Secretary of State for Economic Growth, Energy and Environment. Gregory Barbaccia has been appointed federal CIO, Chief Information Officer, in the executive office of the president to lead US government's IT strategy.  He was in Palantir and was the head of intelligence and investigations. 

The brings us to the question of how the company got its name. Peter Thiel is a fan of The Lord of the Rings by J. R. R. Tolkien. In the novel, a Palantir is a magical sphere. The person who looks into one can see things far away and communicate with someone who holds another Palantír. (The company management is fond of referring to employees as “hobbits”.) He named Palantir after the all-seeing crystal balls. His software and AI also are supposed to be all-seeing. 

In Tolkien’s work, we see both good and bad effects of the use of Palantíri. Only very powerful and capable beings were able to use these seeing stones. But even the very wise could be deceived by what they saw, and using a Palantir led to their downfall. It can be used to distort truth and present selective visions of reality. A kingdom used the Palantirí to facilitate communication and control across a vast territory. One of the story's villains, the wizard Saruman, used a Palantir to surveil his enemies. The Palantiri are a sinister symbol of hubris and a tool of manipulation. 

The Torment Nexus is an expression that refers to dystopian elements in science fiction that technologists pursue as practical goals. Dais Johnston of an online magazine Inverse has defined the Torment Nexus as "shorthand for something that backfired in fiction being unironically replicated in reality." Palantir Technologies is an example of the Torment Nexus. 

Peter Thiel is aware of the moral complexities involved in the use of Palantir in the novel but he seems to think his company is immune to them. Alex Karp indeed seems to take the issue of privacy protection seriously. But how can he ensure that his clients will do the same? How will he be able to ensure that the CEOs who come after him will have the same commitment to privacy protection that he seems to have? It seems inevitable that someone somewhere at some time will use the software for some unethical purposes. 

This has already happened. The company was implicated in the Cambridge Analytica scandal, in which Facebook data was surreptitiously used to try to manipulate millions of Americans into voting for Donald Trump in 2016. The investment bank JPMorganChase sought Palantir’s help for cybersecurity. Soon, though, the software was being used to surveil the bank’s own staff by a bank employee. When Trump launched his immigration crackdown, Palantir was accused of abetting racist and inhumane policies. That Thiel had been one of Trump’s most prominent supporters added to the furor.

Concerned about Palantir’s role in the second Trump administration, former employees of Palantir wrote a warning to their fellow tech workers in Silicon Valley. They recalled that in the epic novel, “the myth of the powerful seeing stones warned of great dangers when wielded by those without wisdom or a moral compass, as they could be used to distort truth and present selective visions of reality.”

Similarly, the Palantir employees warned that the “Palantir Technologies" platform grants immense power to its users, "helping control the data, decisions, and outcomes that determine the future of governments, businesses, and institutions — and by extension, all of us.”

Some of Palantir's critics like to portray the company almost as an all-seeing, all-controlling company. Palantir's supporters say the company is saving Western civilization from collapse. The Trump years exposed an uncomfortable truth: the company’s technology would be a powerful weapon in the hands of an authoritarian regime. In The Philosopher in the Valley, Michael Steinberger writes: 

Palantir was arguably the most interesting company in the world — and possibly also one of the most dangerous. Its technology had the potential to help shape the balance of power in the twenty-first century and to alter the relationship between the individual and the state. Palantir was a window into the panoptic future that had now arrived ...

Palantir Technologies - III of IV

A major thing that's happened in recent years is the advent of AI. Palantir quickly realized that there's going to be huge demand among corporations in incorporating AI functions into their operations and that Palantir software could play this sort of bridging function. It just turbocharged their business. A few years ago the stock was trading at about $10 a share. A few months ago, it topped $200 a share. Palantir's Board of directors awarded Alex Karp $1.1 billion in total compensation in 2020, making him the highest-paid CEO of a publicly traded company that year. 

There is a story which illustrates Alex Karp's aggressive style.  In early 2023, he announced that the company was launching a new AI product that "was under development". None of the engineers in his company knew that there was any such product. He knew that AI is going to be the next big thing so he just decided there will be a product and assumed the engineers will find a way of doing it. And they did. 

Although Alex Karp is very supportive of his employees, he speaks abrasively to outsiders. Trump-style, he taunts his critics and attacks the media. There's a quote from him in a Wall Street Journal story where he says, "we are sorry that our haters are disappointed, but there are more quarters to be disappointed and we are working on that too."  And he goes on to say to his shareholders to stop talking to all the haters.

Much of what the company does is completely benign. It's helping make businesses operate more efficiently. Palantir has also done a lot of good. It played an instrumental role in the COVID response and in the vaccine rollout. It was being used by the World Food Program when the pandemic began. Then there's been stuff that's very concerning. Now Karp's view of what it means to defend the West seems to have changed. For much of Palantir's history, defending the West meant defending liberal democracy, the rule of law.

In the beginning, his political views provided an intriguing contrast with Peter Thiel, who was a libertarian (and who later would gravitate to the far right). But in recent years he has moved closer to Thiel's view. Thiel has spoken very disparagingly of democracy. You don't now hear Karp nor from Palantir talk of defending liberal democracy. They talk about the West now as a cultural entity, a superior culture. 

Peter Thiel has been a long-time Trump supporter and is supposed to be the man behind the rise of JD Vance. Prior to entering politics, Vance had worked for Thiel’s Mithril Capital. When JD Vance contested for his campaign to be senator in Ohio, Peter Thiel contributed $15 million.  He and a lot of his key people are seen very often in the White House.  And many of them are now working either in White House or in Department of Defense.  

Thiel has said that he no longer believes that freedom (he means economic freedom) and democracy are compatible. He wrote, “Since 1920, the vast increase in welfare beneficiaries and the extension of the franchise to women — two constituencies that are notoriously tough for libertarians — have rendered the notion of ‘capitalist democracy’ into an oxymoron.” (He later clarified that he didn’t think anyone should be disenfranchised, while simultaneously suggesting that voting isn’t productive.) He thinks of the West as a collection of countries bound by a shared Judeo-Christian heritage and by attachment in varying degrees to free enterprise.

Thiel has a habit of ignoring or doubting scientific facts that run counter to his worldview. (He even funded an online magazine that promoted creationism.) Thiel’s idea of “freedom” seems to consist of free markets and not much else. He thinks that markets should be free of any regulation. He is skeptical about the value of competition and believes that the most compelling start-ups are those that aim to achieve monopolistic dominance in niche markets. According to him, "Competition is for losers because it destroys profits. You can survive, but you'll never thrive.” 

He gave the example of disc drive manufacturing in the 1980s, which saw repeated advancements every two years, but by different companies. “It had great benefit to consumers, but it didn’t actually help the people who started these companies,” he said. Companies needed not only to have “a huge breakthrough” at the beginning to establish their dominance but also to ensure they had the “last breakthrough” to maintain it, such as by “improving on it at a quick enough pace that no one can ever catch up - that’s great for society. It’s actually not that good for your business.”

Thiel said that an Antichrist would exploit fears of the apocalypse — for example due to nuclear armageddeon, climate change or the threat posed by AI — to control a "frightened population.". The Antichrist is a deceptive figure in Christian theology who opposes Christ and embodies ultimate evil. Thiel’s overall definition of the Antichrist “is that of an evil king or tyrant or anti-messiah who appears in the end times”. He identifies the Antichrist with anyone or any institution that he dislikes – from environmental activist Greta Thunberg to governmental attempts to regulate artificial intelligence. He labeled AI safety researchers who call for strict regulation as potential agents of the Antichrist.

In an interview to the NYT, he talked about his fears of an Antichrist taking over the world. The interviewer asked him if he doesn’t think that the Antichrist who he is so worried about would use the the tools that his company Palantir is creating to take over the world; that without such tools, such a takeover would not be possible. Thiel didn’t have a good answer. 

Thiel and Karp, are strong supporters of Israel. After 7th of October 2023, they took a plane load of Palantir top staff to Tel Aviv in solidarity. And then they faced a big pushback from many quarters that their platforms was being used by the Israeli military.  How did they respond? They decided to hold their next board meeting in Tel Aviv.

Palantir Technologies - II of IV

Karp is a very people-oriented person. He encouraged his employees to express themselves with absolute candor. “Alex’s attitude was that you should be able to tell even the CEO to fuck off,” says a software engineer. Even so, his colleagues felt as if Karp could almost burrow into people’s minds and implant his ideas. He seemed to have an astonishing ability to get people to see things his way and to do things that he wanted. 

Karp was good to those who worked for him. He was not one to scream or threaten, nor did he ever publicly upbraid or humiliate people. He disliked firing people even when there were problems with them. He would joke that his job was “managing unmanageable people.” Whenever he shared his thoughts about the work the engineers were doing, he made it clear that pushback was welcome. In this way, he had won the confidence and allegiance of Palantir’s engineers. Palantirians were intensely devoted to him. 

Karp has severe dyslexia (which makes his academic achievements even more impressive). He believed that his managerial acumen was tied to his dyslexia.  He says that it “fucked me but also gave me wings to fly.” He developed certain attributes that would prove useful in business. Dyslexia taught him the power of collaboration since those who have it need the help of others. In an environment that required team-building and delegating responsibility, Karp found that he had an intrinsic advantage. Dyslexics, he said, aren’t raised on an ethos of self-reliance and tend to excel in situations in which they have to work with other people. 

The company was a reflection of him: of his habits and quirks, of the experiences that had shaped him, and above all, of his bleak worldview and the anxieties that weighed on him. His sense of foreboding, he said, “propels a lot of decisions for this company". Karp’s commitment to Palantir was absolute. He rarely took a day off, and on most weeknights, he ate dinner at his desk.

From the start, Karp said that Palantir’s mission was to defend the West and liberal democracy. The company was a creation of 9/11 where it was felt that different agencies had the required data but had failed to post them together properly. Even before 9/11, Karp was skeptical that the end of the Cold War had ushered in an era of irreversible peace and prosperity. There was nothing utopian about Palantir; if anything, the company was founded on the conviction that we were facing a bleak future. Karp once said that bad times are incredibly good for Palantir.

He was fully supportive of Ukraine when it was invaded by Russia. In one sense, it wasn't Karp's choice. The United States was giving support indirectly to the Ukrainians from the start to try to help them repel the Russian attack and Palantir's software played a significant part in that. He felt strongly that every country should be able to have its own sovereignty over its territory. Three months after Russia invaded Ukraine, he went to Kyiv where he met President Zelensky and expressed his support for Ukraine and offered to open an office there. 

He identifies very strongly with his Jewish heritage and is a staunch supporter of Israel. Being biracial, Jewish and also severely dyslexic, he has always understood that this was a world that wouldn't necessarily be a very hospitable world for someone like him. Soon after the war in Ukraine started, the war in Gaza started after the October 7th attacks by Hamas in Israel. The October 7th attacks gets right to his sense of vulnerability.

He saw it as ushering in a period of enormous danger for Jews everywhere, not just in Israel, and this informed his reaction. Palantir was already working with Israel. The Mossad used its technology. But now after October 7th, Palatir's involvement increased. It took out a full page ad in the New York Times saying that Palantir stands with Israel. This was deeply personal for him. And Karp is furious over the protests on American college campuses against the war in Gaza which he sees as evidence of a broader rot on the left.

The slaughter in Israel also cemented his political metamorphosis. Although he had long ago stopped describing himself as a neo-socialist, he still claimed to be progressive. He was a Hillary Clinton supporter in 2016, and he had made clear to employees that he was personally repulsed by Trump. He had said, "I respect nothing about the dude. It would be hard to make up someone I find less appealing.” On certain issues, such as immigration, he expressed opinions that seemed consistent with a liberal worldview (at the same time, though, he opposed affirmative action and was a staunch supporter of the Second Amendment to the US constitution). 

But he thought progressives had been very irresponsible on the issue of immigration. He was increasingly unhappy over the role of identity politics and started drifting away from the left. In the meantime, Donald Trump (who he had criticized earlier, calling him "a phony billionaire") was running for president again, and Karp started warming to Republicans and to the idea of a second Trump presidency. He recognized that it was a huge opportunity for Palantir, being a major government contractor, if they played their cards right. 

Now he is a big Trump supporter, involved in ICE operations. He had quietly made a $1 million personal donation to the Trump-Vance Inaugural Committee. He published a book called The Technological Republic: Hard Power, Soft Belief, and the Future of the West whose main point is that a new, tech-driven nationalism was needed to keep America, and by extension the West, dominant. After an interview on CNBC, one of the cohosts commented that Karp was “an enigma wrapped in a riddle. He always emphasizes ‘I’m a progressive’ and then he "goes on to sound like just a huge right-winger.”

Palantir's platform was used with Anthropic’s Claude in the capture of Venezuela’s President Nicolás Maduro, according to the Wall Street Journal. Karp told CNBC that his company’s technology is being used in the war in the Middle East. He seemed frustrated that he couldn’t take more credit for the continued war being waged in Iran and made it clear that he supports President Donald Trump’s efforts. Palantir has experienced significant stock appreciation and high valuation multiples since the start of the conflict in the Middle East.

Palantir Technologies - I of IV

Palantir Technologies is a relatively small company, with only around four thousand employees but its reach is huge.  Climate change, famine, immigration, human trafficking, financial fraud, customs enforcement at ICE, the future of warfare - Palantir is at the center of many events that you see in the news. Under President Trump, Palantir has become an essential tool in American wars abroad and policy at home. Yet it has stayed largely under the radar.  

Its stock rose around 500% in the past 5 years. But it had a poor 2026 although it has risen again in the past few days. Palantir was one of the most expensive stocks on the market when its decline began, and even after its sell-off, it is still expensive at over 100 times forward earnings. Many think it will follow the same path as Nvidia, another company that benefited from the rise of artificial intelligence. And yet, unlike Nvidia, many people don’t know what Palantir does. There was a funny tweet that illustrated this point: 

“If someone held me hostage and asked me to explain what Palantir does, tell my family I love them…”

The company was founded by Peter Thiel (first major Facebook investor and founder of PayPal) and Alex Karp in 2003. Alex Karp is the chief executive officer. It was started after the 9/11 attacks in the US and was financed in part by In-Q-Tel, the CIA’s venture capital arm. A number of secret services now use Palantir, including the Mossad. All six branches of the U.S. military has deployed its technology. Palantir clients include the FBI, the IRS, and the National Institutes of Health, or NIH. It has become a major defense contractor. 

Alex Carp has a very unusual background for someone who is a big name in Silicon Valley. He grew up in Philadelphia in a very left-wing household, the son of a Jewish pediatrician and a black mother who's an artist. Much of his childhood was spent going to anti-war protest and he used to describe himself as a neo-socialist. He's biracial and he identified very strongly with his black heritage. He was someone who was sensitized to injustice both at home and abroad.

Karp majored in philosophy at Haverford. He went on to earn a law degree from Stanford University and a doctorate in social theory from Germany’s Goethe University, Frankfurt. He had no desire to pursue a career in academia, and when Peter Thiel, a law school classmate, asked Karp in 2003 if he would be interested in joining a start-up that was building software to fight terrorism, he jumped at the opportunity. Not long thereafter, Karp became Palantir’s CEO.  

Under Karp, Palantir became a dominant force in data analytics, a multibillion-dollar enterprise with swank offices around the world and an aura of intrigue that set it apart from other Silicon Valley companies. The company went public in 2020 and officially made Karp a billionaire. He became a center of attention at events like the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. Heads of state were eager to hear his thoughts, and he was in ever-greater demand as a speaker.

What exactly does Palantir do? It works with the raw data that has been collected by the various organizations it works with. Palantir doesn’t collect or store the data itself, and it doesn't sell data. This data collected by the various organizations is messy and riddled with mistakes, can be coded in different languages, such as Python or Java and can be stored in multiple databases that aren’t linked. There is also the problem of dealing with the huge volume of data that is generated now via phones, watches, satellites, automobiles, etc. 

Palantir produces software that enables organizations to pool the data they have which is tedious work if done manually. The software cleans up and standardizes the data and turns it into a composite dataset. Customers run queries to find patterns, correlations, trends, connections in that data that would take human analysts hours, days, even weeks to find. They typically work with large organizations that pull in massive amounts of data on a daily basis, like the US Army or Airbus.

It can be customized to reflect the particular needs and habits of mind that guide a corporation or a government agency and can be applied to a broad range of issues. For example, it has been used by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to track food borne illnesses; by the German pharmaceutical company Merck KGaA to accelerate the development of new drugs and by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) to combat insider trading.

The troubling legacy of Fritz Haber - V of V

Albert Einstein, already living abroad, observed Haber’s suffering but felt little sympathy. Einstein’s earlier disdain for all things German had hardened, under the influence of events, into fierce loathing. His letters to Haber display the satisfaction of a man who’d finally won a long-running argument. “I can imagine your inner conflicts,” he wrote to Haber in May 1933. “It is somewhat like having to abandon a theory on which you have worked for your whole life. It’s not the same for me because I never believed in it in the least.

Haber was plagued by depression, physical weakness, and a failing heart. He died in 1934, broken, unable to work in his native country which he had served so loyally, unable to work in another country since it was reluctant to accept him. The deepest tragedy in this was the fact that his destruction was, in part, self-destruction - he had led the pro-German chorus during the WWI. 

As the years passed, Haber’s work during World War I grew into a symbol of science’s uneasy conscience about its workings. Before Haber, soldiers had never relied so heavily on the latest products of science and industry. Never before had research institutes worked so closely with military leaders. Scientists and generals alike began to understand that their once-distant worlds were linked forever. Gas warfare became one symbol of this union. 

Haber represented the first of a breed. He was the forerunner of every modern scientist who works on banned weapons — at least those weapons, such as nuclear bombs, that international treaties allow in a few privileged nations but not in others. And the moral choices that he confronted during his life were not so different from those that we face today. He was not an evil man. His defining traits — loyalty, intelligence, generosity, industry, and creativity — have always been prized traits. 

Scientists abroad marveled at the German marriage of science and warfare, and rushed to imitate it. The United States set up a National Research Council and began a crash program to build nitrate factories of its own. It spent $100 million on them (about $1.6 billion today) by the end of the WWI which forged enduring links between universities and the military. Philosopher John Dewey called this interweaving of science and government policy a kind of borrowed “Prussianism” and predicted that it would remain even after the war had ended and so it has proved. Haber was the spiritual father of the military-industrial complex. 

Some time after the war, Haber's institute had made an insecticide called Zyklon A, a cyanide-based crystal that turned into vapor when exposed to air. Haber helped arrange funding for their laboratory. Later the concerned scientists moved to another laboratory where they upgraded it to Zyklon B. After Haber’s death, came the horrors of WWII. The Nazis built human-scale gas chambers and used Zyclon B as a tool of death on a scale beyond all normal imagination. Members of Fritz Haber’s extended family, children of his sisters and cousins, were hauled to those camps and killed by a gas their famous relative had helped develop.

If German politics had turned out differently, Fritz Haber might have been considered a hero, and statues of him might now stand in prominent places. Instead, Haber became a tragic figure. Haber's motivations may seem misguided, but before we rush to condemn, we have to remember that most of us behave in the same way. Most people, now as then, swim with the current of public sentiment; most embrace technical progress; most support their homelands. Haber too was guided by these motivations but his superior intelligence and drive meant that he went further and more dramatically than most. 

Haber embodied the capacity of science to nourish life and destroy it. The legacy of this forgotten scientist is present in every day’s news headlines and in every bite of food. Nitrogen is essential in war and in peace and the chemical reaction that Haber discovered delivered unlimited quantities of it. You could say that Haber snatched bread and bombs from the atmosphere. Ultimately the same person who saved billions of lives is also responsible for the deaths of millions of people. 

The institute in Berlin that once was Fritz Haber’s domain bears his name: The Fritz Haber Institute of the Max Planck Society. The name is mildly controversial at the institute; occasionally someone suggests that it be changed. Matthias Scheffler, one of the institute’s five directors,  prefers to keep the name. It reminds every scientist at the institute that knowledge can be a tool for good and for evil, for creation and destruction. A high school in Berlin that once bore Haber’s name did drop it a few years ago.  In Master Mind: The Rise and Fall of Fritz Haber, the Nobel Laureate Who Launched the Age of Chemical Warfare, Daniel Charles says about why most people tend to ignore his memory: 

The reason, I suspect, is that he fits no convenient category. Haber was both hero and villain; a Jew who was also a German patriot; a victim of the Nazis who was accused of war crimes himself. Unwilling to admire him, unable to condemn him, most people found it easier to look away.

Clara Immerwahr, Fritz Haber's first wife, has found fame in recent decades. The Clara Immerwahr Award launched by UniSysCat (Unifying Systems in Catalysis) in 2011, is an award for promoting equity and excellence in catalysis research fostering young female scientists at an early stage of their career. Haber's institute, The Fritz Haber Institute of the Max Planck Society had a memorial built for Clara in the garden of the institute in 2006.

The troubling legacy of Fritz Haber - IV of V

Haher considered the horror evoked by the use of poison gas irrational. He saw no reason why asphyxiation should be considered more ghastly than, for instance, having one’s leg blown off and gradually bleeding to death. He viewed war, and gas in particular, with the cool eye of the technocrat. He thought of gas warfare as an intellectual challenge, or an intricate game that had more psychological impact. 

Haber argued that the psychological power of traditional weapons was quickly spent as soldiers quickly got used to them. Chemicals, on the other hand, represented a many-faceted and ever-changing threat. Each new poison thus posed a new lethal threat, and a new psychic challenge to the foe, “unsettling the soul.” They produced, as he noted enthusiastically in 1925, “more fright and less destruction!”  Gas worked to the advantage of the most advanced industrial societies, Haber argued. He knew well enough that his weapons were widely hated, but he dismissed it. He saw only one explanation for it: prejudice against anything new and disruptive.

As Germany’s economy crumbled and its political system came apart at the seams after the war and the crippling demands of the Treaty of Versailles, Haber suffered as well. It was a time of honor and dishonor. One day he feared being placed on trial as a war criminal; the next he received science’s most prestigious prize. He also encountered moral condemnation from an old acquaintance who was appalled by the use of poison gas. Haber sent a brief, dismissive response, suggesting that his hostility to chemical weapons was outdated and that use of such weapons was legal. The acquaintance wrote back, asking Haber to consider not just whether gas weapons were legal, but also whether they were moral:

I hoped that you might agree with this view: That we, as chemists, have a special responsibility in the future to point out the dangers of modern technology, and in so doing to promote peaceful relations in Europe, since the devastation of another war would be almost unthinkable.

Haber was angry at the world. He considered himself and his country victims of political persecution. The Versailles Treaty prohibited German chemical weapons, but they did not prohibit the victors from researching into them. Haber was quite ready to violate the treaty’s terms if he could get away with it.  When the British chemist Harold Hartley, acting as an international arms inspector, arrived at Haber’s institute in 1921 to check for research on forbidden weapons, Haber probably did not tell him about a nearby laboratory that routinely worked with banned chemicals that Germany had once used as weapons.

Fritz Haber had written off the possibility of getting a Nobel prize. Members of the Nobel Committee in Stockholm, however, understood the enormous significance of the ammonia synthesis. When the news arrived in mid-November 1919 that he had won the prize after all, Haber seemed happier for his country than for himself. But it led to an immediate howl of indignation, particularly in Belgium and France, who had been at the receiving end of the as warfare. There were no protests at the ceremony itself though many Allied diplomats and Nobel laureates found reasons not to attend. 

Events of the 1920s and his own increasing age forced Haber, more frequently as the years passed, to reflect on the past. In a speech to Breslau’s Academic-Literary Association, he recalled the naive complacency of his youth when he had felt that his Jewish ancestry did not matter. He spoke of unthinking German patriotism and how the war destroyed both prosperity and illusions of national unity. He ended his speech with a plea for tolerance, intellectual freedom, and democracy. 

As Hitler’s movement swelled in power, Haber’s mood grew dark. On occasion, he even seemed to question technical progress which he had always believed in. Early in 1932, he confessed that the previous half-century’s technical innovations appeared to be merely “fire in the hands of small children.” One year later, Adolf Hitler was named Germany’s chancellor, and Haber wrote in a letter that he had "the feeling that I’ve made serious mistakes in life." He did not say what those mistakes had been.

He dimly foresaw Germany’s political catastrophe but he never imagined that it could strip him so completely of his dearest possessions and turn his proudest accomplishments into ashes. What counted now was ancestry alone and Haber’s forebodings became reality. The government unveiled a law ordering the removal within six months of all Jews from the German civil service.  The law covered every German university professor and nearly every scientist at the institutes of the Kaiser Wilhelm Society.

Haber, too, soon would find his situation intolerable. Apart from Einstein, who was traveling at the time and immediately declared that he wasn’t coming back to Germany, Haber was the most prominent Jewish scientist at the Kaiser Wilhelm Society. Max Planck, president of the Kaiser Wilhelm Society, tried to save Haber by trying to convince the führer that forcing valuable Jews to emigrate amounted to Germany’s “self- mutilation" but Hitler flew into such a rage that Planck could only leave the room.

The remainder of Haber’s life is a chronicle of losses: his villa and institute, his fortune, and his remaining reserves of strength. Equally shattering, though, was a kind of spiritual dispossession, the loss of his faith and identity. He’d helped feed the ravenous beast that was turning on him. “I am bitter as never before, and the feeling that this is unbearable increases by the day.

The troubling legacy of Fritz Haber - III of V

One of the scientists who Haber persuaded to join him was Albert Einstein. He had the opposite mind-set to that of Haber though they always remained good friends. Einstein was all critique, disdainful of conventional wisdom and established institutions, scornful of ties to community or nation. As a teenager, he had taken the remarkable step of formally renouncing his German nationality. In a letter to his cousin, Einstein composed this devastating portrait of his new friend:

Haber’s picture unfortunately is to be seen everywhere. It pains me every time I think of it. Unfortunately, I have to accept that this otherwise so splendid man has succumbed to personal vanity and not even of the most tasteful kind. This defect is in fact generally and unfortunately a Berlin kind. 

The full story of Haber’s activities during World War I will never be told, for the records have disappeared. But the outlines can be pieced together. Haber persuaded military officers to adopt new technology, cajoled industrial executives into meeting the government’s demands, and assigned scientists the task of solving military problems. No process existed that would convert large amounts of ammonia (NH3) into nitric acid (HNO3). There are hints in fragments of surviving correspondence that he began proposing producing nitrate from ammonia by a previously unproven method.  

Factories were built for making nitrate for making munitions and bombs. Haber’s ammonia-making process was now feeding the machines of war. A manifesto signed by many German intellectuals was published which absolved Germany from any responsibility for the war (Germany had entered WWI as an aggressor), asserted that Germany was victim, not aggressor. It repudiated those who argued that German society had been hijacked by a military cult. One of the signatories was Fritz Haber. 

Albert Einstein was among the very few who did not sign it, rejecting allegiance to his nation and its young men in battle. He called the war “madness” and blamed Germany’s “religious faith in power” for provoking it. He signed a counter-manifesto calling for European unity and an end to the war. He watched with horror as fellow German scientists, Haber in the lead, laid their skills at the altar of Germany’s war efforts. “Our entire much-praised technological progress, and civilization generally,” Einstein wrote in 1917, “could be compared to an ax in the hand of a pathological criminal.” 

His friend Fritz Haber, meanwhile was working on producing poison gas. The challenge of chemical warfare, in its marriage of the scientific and practical worlds, was the sort at which Haber excelled. Other scientists like Albert Einstein had produced more profound intellectual insights. None, however, possessed Haber’s talent for human organization, and these were the skills that war demanded. When dealing with military matters, Haber learned to “think like a general”

He suggested releasing clouds of chlorine gas, carried to the front lines in pressurized tanks and released when the wind was favorable. He felt that this could asphyxiate soldiers in enemy trenches. Use of poison gas shocked each of Europe’s armed camps and led to imitation by everyone. On the German side, there was celebration and long-sought military honors for Fritz Haber who was promoted to officer grade. 

Sometime between April 24 and April 29, 1915, Fritz Haber returned to Berlin.  It was a quick visit, lasting only until May 2. Nobody knows what happened but on the night of May 1–2, Clara Haber found her husband’s army-issued pistol, shot herself with it, and died. Fritz Haber, obeying his orders, returned the next day to the front lines of combat. Hermann, just twelve years old, was left behind without mother or father. Clara’s final choice became in many minds a condemnation of her husband’s hand in killing.

By mid-1915, Fritz Haber was Germany’s czar of gas warfare. Haber commandeered all the empty laboratories he could find, surrounding them with barbed wire and military guards and filling them with a swirl of research on new poisons and gas masks. By 1917, Haber’s empire encompassed 1,500 people, including 150 scientists, with a budget fifty times larger than the institute’s peacetime level. He experimented with phosgene and mustard gas. Haber's conception of himself at this time is revealed by a quote: 

I was one of the mightiest men in Germany. I was more than a great army commander, more than a captain of industry. I was the founder of industries; my work was essential for the economic and military expansion of Germany. All doors were open to me

The troubling legacy of Fritz Haber - II of V

Haber had known a woman named Clara Immerwahr for a decade. She was the first woman ever to acquire a doctorate from Breslau’s university. In the visible facts of their life, Haber and Clara had much in common. Both had grown up within Breslau’s Jewish community, though neither had ever been religiously observant.  Clara was two years younger. Haber persuaded her to link her life with his but she was filled with misgivings. Clara initially turned down Haber’s proposal, saying that she “wasn’t the right sort for marriage” before finally accepting it. In August of 1901, Fritz and Clara were married.

For Haber, marriage was one more step along the path he’d already been traveling. He threw himself into research with even greater passion. For Clara, on the other hand, it provoked a crisis of identity. She had abandoned her tenuous position in the world of science and had become a professor’s wife, responsible for running a household, cooking, cleaning, washing, and mending. She felt trapped, unable to pursue her intellectual passions and unable to find satisfaction in her newly assigned role.

They had a son in 1902 who was named Hermann. Throughout his life, Fritz Haber never really found domestic peace or a stable balance between professional and family life. He sometimes spoke of family as something confining, as the enemy of true friendship and the “murderer of talent.” Clara Haber’s letters display a striking contrast in tone. When discussing chemistry, or professional disputes among colleagues, her writing is animated, lively, and confident. When the topic turns to domestic and personal affairs, she seems frustrated and frequently seized by dark moods.

The breadth of Haber's interests continued to amaze and confound his colleagues. During 1904 and 1905, Haber published seventeen different papers in half a dozen different journals. He wrote one more book, his last and most successful one, called Thermodynamics of Technical Gas Reactions. Haber had become by this time one of the most accomplished physical chemists in all of Germany. He seemed to recognize no limits either to his time or his talents. But his home life was not too happy. Clara saw limits and dangers where Fritz saw none. His inability to economize, either with time or money, produced constant friction. 

He then discovered a chemical reaction that would shape an epoch. It was known that plants needed nitrogen to ensure proper growth and atmospheric nitrogen was not available to them. Haber turned his attention to finding out such a reaction due to a fortuitous set of circumstances. One was scientific rivalry with a scientist named Walther Nernst who was a dominant figure in their field. Haber envied Nernst, and resented him because he had slighted him for earlier research into fixing atmospheric nitrogen. 

An extraordinary scientist named Robert Le Rossignol joined Haber’s laboratory and helped in the design of new experimental equipment. He then acquired a compressor that was able to squeeze  mixtures of hydrogen and nitrogen gas to pressures two hundred times greater than normal atmospheric pressure along with extreme heat. Finally, Haber acquired a new and powerful industrial partner,  BASF, Germany’s largest chemical company. The BASF funded Haber personally and if Haber’s work led to commercial production, he was to receive royalty payments equal to 10 percent of the company’s net profits from his discoveries.

The third week of March 1909 brought the miracle. Haber combined nitrogen and hydrogen to produce ammonia. Essentially the same process that Haber discovered is being followed even now in much larger equipments. Worldwide, nearly a hundred million tons of nitrogen are now taken from the air each year, converted into ammonia, and spread across the surface of the earth as fertilizer. About half the people on earth could not survive in the absence of the chemical reaction discovered by Haber. 

But the problem with most biological processes is that the benefits are immediately apparent but the costs are long term and thus remain hidden for a long time. Nitrates pollute groundwater supplies in many farming areas. Nitrogen oxides in the air turn into ozone, harming both humans and plant life. Leftover fertilizer is slowly killing streams, lakes, and coastal ecosystems across the northern hemisphere. Runaway nutrients from farmers’ fields are feeding blooms of algae that cloud the water, suck up oxygen, and suffocate fish. When the fish die, birds that feed on them soon disappear. Plant species that thrive in the presence of nitrogen start growing uncontrollably, crowding out other plants. The result is a depleted ecosystem, supporting a less rich and complex web of life.

But this is not the end of Haber's story. The reclusive banker Leopold Koppel wanted to setup a Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for physical chemistry. He wanted Fritz Haber to become the institute’s founding director. In negotiations with the government, he made sure that Haber’s institute would be allowed to apply for patents on its discoveries. Never again would his life be fully devoted to personally exploring mysteries of the material world because of the logistical challenge of building and running his institute, hiring scientists, and managing its budget. 

He was attracted by Berlin’s symbols of power, honor, and national influence and he never seriously considered leaving it. As a member of the nation’s elite, he also accepted its assumptions: that his nation, surrounded by enemies, demanded his loyalty; that its growing military might serve the cause of peace; that the nation, if united, could never be defeated. The state’s goals defined his own.  Nation, government, and emperor, in Haber’s mind, were one. He was honored and duty-bound to serve them.

The troubling legacy of Fritz Haber - I of V

The dependence on guano and nitrates was ended by the Haber-Bosch process which is a source of limitless nitrogen. It takes nitrogen from the air and links it to hydrogen, “fixing” it in the form of ammonia. Ammonia is plant food but it is often converted into other forms that farmers can handle more easily. Today, about half of all the nitrogen consumed by all the world’s crops each year comes not from natural sources such as bacteria in the soil, but from ammonia factories employing the Haber-Bosch process. But Fritz Haber's story is complicated. 

Haber was born in 1868 into a large and tightly knit Jewish clan. His mother died 3 weeks after giving birth to him. He grew into a talkative, energetic teenager, an enthusiastic student but not a spectacularly gifted one. After his schooling he decided that he wanted to study chemistry. As a teenager, Haber had already begun homemade experiments, some of them dangerous. In 1886, he headed for the university in Berlin.

Before 1871, there was no country named Germany. After the formation of the State, Germans considered mastery of science and technology to be among their great strengths. Any industrial success, scientific breakthrough, or new rail link was cause for celebration because it was viewed as contribution to the strength and status of the nation. Of all the sciences, Chemistry was the science that was most closely linked to Germany’s rise. 

Fritz Haber was part of the first generation of Prussian Jews in a thousand years who could imagine that their Jewish heritage might not create any major hurdles in life. The newly formed country had abolished all restrictions on civil rights based on “religious difference.” Jews became teachers, civil servants, and were elected to public office. Discrimination persisted, and anti-Jewish campaigns erupted from time to time, but for Fritz Haber, all opportunities seemed open and he was eager to grab them. 

But when he went to Berlin, Haber found mostly frustration and disappointment. He found the lectures confusing and the chemical experiments trivial and unchallenging. All the complicated ideas flying past his ears left him feeling intimidated. German students were free to go from one university to the next before eventually taking the final examination required for their degree. After one year in Berlin, Haber moved to Heidelberg, in southwest Germany, where he liked it no better. 

Haber approached his twentieth birthday, and with it the prospect of military duty. Any young man who’d attended university could serve a one-year term in the military, as long as he paid all his own costs. Fritz was among the privileged few. In 1888, with his father paying the bills, he joined a field artillery regiment stationed in his hometown of Breslau. There was great social status that came with military rank in Haber’s Germany. It embodied honored German virtues of discipline and duty. No matter what career one pursued, an officer’s uniform was a social mark of distinction. 

Haber found the details of military life — the constant orders, the “noisy desolation” of the firing range, the never-changing routine — tiresome and odious. But for the rest of his life, his personal habits — the way he walked, stood, and spoke — paid unconscious homage to military custom and discipline. He wanted to become an officer but was not selected. At that time, no Prussian Jew had ever become a reserve officer, except in the medical corps. 

He swallowed his disappointment and went back to university studies in Berlin. He still had no idea what he really wanted to do. Haber met a fellow student named Richard Abegg who introduced him to the specialty within chemistry, called physical chemistry, in which Haber eventually would make his reputation. It was a brand-new field, and Haber hadn’t encountered it before but again he failed to get selected. His teachers didn’t seem to notice the qualities that others later praised so highly. 

After many odd jobs, Haber finally decided that he would pursue a career as an academic scientist. In December 1894, he was hired as an assistant in the Technical University of Karlsruhe’s technical-chemical institute. The university’s chemistry institute had solid funding from the local government and intimate relations with the country’s largest chemical company, the Badische Anilin- & Soda-Fabrik, known as the BASF. 

From the beginning, Haber seemed to master a field overnight and challenged electrochemistry's established authorities. He published a new textbook on electrochemistry which was praised as a novel synthesis of electrochemistry’s two distinct sides, the practical and the theoretical. Similarly, he became the university’s expert in the field of dyes and chemicals, a field he had not studied before. When asked how he managed to master such a range of specialties so quickly, Haber replied that he “studied every night until 2 a.m. until I got it.” He was promoted to full professorship. 

Despite his lengthening list of accomplishments, Haber remained an outsider in his chosen field. He compensated by working even harder and asserting himself even more strongly. He developed a thin skin, a special sensitivity to slights. He feuded with other scientists, and when criticized he responded sharply. Some resented his ambition and drive. 

Guano - II of II

Other countries also used their desire for guano as a reason to expand their empires. The United Kingdom claimed Kiritimati and Malden Island for the British Empire. Other nations that claimed guano islands included Australia, France, Germany, Japan, and Mexico. Guano ended up at the centre of several conflicts. Peru, Chile, Bolivia and Spain went to war over guano-producing land, borders and taxes. Guano also helped to fuel the First World War thanks to its use as an ingredient in gunpowder.

All this doesn’t mean that guano was unknown before Western nations discovered it. It had been used in agriculture for more than 1,500 years. It was particularly treasured by the Inca Empire. Using bird guano as a fertiliser helped the empire to thrive, sustaining more than eight million people. It was so important to the Inca people that anyone who disturbed the seabirds faced the death penalty. The secret of guano’s fertilising power first spread to Europe in the mid-1500s, following Spain’s arrival and colonisation of South America. Guano’s popularity peaked in the nineteenth century – often called The Guano Age – and continued into the twentieth century. 

These guano islands were not paradises. Guano accumulated only in extremely dry climates where the lack of rainfall allowed bird droppings to collect for centuries. Such islands were unpromising sites for human habitation.  Guano mining — tunneling, picking, and blasting the stuff loose and hauling it to waiting ships — was arguably the single worst job you could have in the nineteenth century. Respiratory diseases, causing workers to pass out or cough up blood, and gastrointestinal ailments were common. 

In all, about four hundred thousand tons of rock guano came off the islands the U.S. owned. Guano didn’t solve the soil exhaustion crisis, but, combined with Chilean sodium nitrates, which companies started selling later in the century, it held it at bay. Mined fertilizers kept industrial agriculture sustainable long enough for scientists to devise a more permanent solution. Demand for guano rapidly declined after 1910 with the development of the Haber–Bosch process for extracting nitrogen from the atmosphere.

Guano mining continues in Chile with the annual guano production in Chile ranging from 2,091 to 4,601 metric tons per year in the 2014–2023 period. With the rising popularity of organic food in the twenty-first century, the demand for guano has started to rise again.

But our demand for guano has also taken a toll on the birds that make it. At the peak of guano mining, it is estimated that that Peru’s coasts and islands were home to some 53 million seabirds. But guano mining sent some seabird populations spiraling into decline. One estimate states that these same Peruvian seabird populations had dropped to a mere 4.2 million by 2011. In the days of intensive guano extraction, important breeding grounds would have been disturbed by people year after year. Such disturbances cause entire colonies to abandon their nesting sites.

Losing large numbers of seabirds can have devastating consequences. Guano is a vital resource in nature. The nutrients that seabirds transport from marine environments and deposit as guano feeds plants and diverse invertebrate communities. The nutrients also trickle back into the ocean, helping tropical coral reefs to grow and recover from bleaching.

Guano is also the namesake for one of the nucleobases in RNA and DNA: guanine which was first obtained from guano. 

Guano - I of II

In 1857, the United States began annexing small islands throughout the Caribbean and the Pacific. By the end of the century, it would claim almost a hundred of them. The islands had no indigenous populations and, at the time, no strategic value. They tended to be remote, rocky, and rainless but they had the one thing that everyone in the nineteenth century badly wanted. They had “white gold,” - guano - better known as bird shit.

In the nineteenth century, land fertility started suffering because of the lack of nitrogen. Nitrogen makes up nearly four-fifths of the earth’s atmosphere by volume but it is almost exclusively  dinitrogen (N2) which is unreactive and thus inaccessible to plants. The bacteria that inhabit the nodules of the roots of some legumes can convert it into a form usable by plants. It took chemists until the nineteenth century to piece all that together. 

But farmers, in their own way, had comprehended it for millennia. All agricultural traditions require methods for managing nitrogen flows. Nitrogen-rich manures are spread, crops rotated, forests burned, fields left fallow, or lentils planted. These complex systems faltered, however, in the nineteenth century. Farms that used to grow a rotating variety of crops for local consumption started focusing on the most profitable crops and grew them for distant markets. Single-crop farms yielded diminishing returns due to what was called “Soil exhaustion”.  

Farmers used various items for organic material that could be spread on their fields to replenish them like rapeseed cake, linseed cake, malt dust, straw, spoiled hay, oats, putrefied animal remains etc. What did work was guano. That term can refer to any bird or bat feces used as fertilizer, but the guano on everyone’s minds was the nitrogen-rich droppings of cormorants, boobies, and pelicans on the Chincha Islands off the coast of Peru. The guano piled hundreds of feet high and baked in the sun, so that the very rock of the islands was centuries’ worth of calcified bird droppings.

Guano's sharp, ammoniacal smell was notorious, perceptible from miles off. And yet, sprinkled in small quantities over the farms of North America that were nitrogen-starved, the stuff worked miracles. Huge demand drove up the cost. So did the tight control of the supply by British firms that monopolized guano exports from the Chinchas and kept prices high. The “guano question” came up again and again in the US Congress.

Guano entrepreneurs hastily formed the American Guano Company, with a capitalization of $10 million (all federal expenditures in 1850 totaled less than $45 million). The US passed the Guano Islands Act in 1856. Under its terms, whenever a U.S. citizen discovered guano on an unclaimed, uninhabited island, that island would, “at the discretion of the President, be considered as appertaining to the United States.” This meant that those islands would, in some way, belong to the country. This Act is the reason why the USA has so many territories in the Pacific today. 

Ian Fleming' novel, Doctor No is set on a guano island. When James Bond first arrives in Jamaica, the colonial secretary sits him down for a lecture on guano’s history (“Bond prepared to be bored”) which lasts an entire chapter. The secretary starts with the British-Peruvian monopoly and works his way up to Fritz Haber’s invention of ammonia synthesis. The point, as he comes to it, is that there are small, uninhabited islands scattered around the Caribbean. And one has been purchased by a mysterious international figure, Doctor Julius No.

At the end of the novel, Bond defeats Doctor No by burying him in a guano pit, the villain’s “screaming lungs stuffing with the filthy dust” until he dies. In the 1962 film version, however, there is no trace of guano. Doctor No’s base is powered by a nuclear reactor, and Bond triumphs in the end by triggering a meltdown, drowning Doctor No in the pool containing the overheating reactor and wrecking the island. 

Hatshepsut - II of II

The story of Hatshepsut finally started being pieced together in the 1920s. Archaeologists from the Metropolitan Museum of Art found two pits near Luxor filled with many broken bits of statues. The statues had been installed in a magnificent temple that Hatshepsut had built. Workmen of yore had toppled them and dragged them to the edge of a pit. There they attacked the statues with sledgehammers and rocks. Then they dumped the broken fragments into the pit.

The archaeologists found that numerous inscriptions and carvings had been destroyed chiseling out Hatshepsut’s name and image. The workers seemed to have removed Hatshepsut’s name and face, and not the inscriptions that described the events of her reign. She doesn’t appear on any of the kings’ lists, which are the ancient records of all the pharaohs and their dynasties. Cleopatra would never have heard of her. Hatshepsut had literally been defaced. 

But in a society where the illiteracy rate was between 95 and 99 percent, it was inevitable that some mentions of Hatshepsut would be missed. Many of the guys who were sent into the temple to remove Hatshepsut’s name seemed not to have tried hard enough. The surviving inscriptions told a remarkable story. 

Hatshepsut took the throne in around 1478 BC, in a period that historians call the Eighteenth Dynasty. (The same dynasty would later include some of the best-known names in Egyptian history, including Akhenaten, the “heretic king,” and his son Tutankhamun.) Hatshepsut was the daughter of a pharaoh and then the principal wife of that pharaoh’s son (who was her own half brother). Then her husband died, leaving a young son by a secondary wife. Hatshepsut served as co-regent with the toddler for a short time. Then she took the throne in her own name.

She reigned for nearly two decades. She thrived, and Egypt thrived. She built monuments across the length of Egypt, most notably in Thebes. There she commissioned obelisks and statues and her masterpiece, the immense temple that Champollion explored. 

How to explain the violence directed against her images? The order to remove all evidence of Hatshepsut’s existence came from her stepson, Tuthmosis III, who succeeded her on the throne. It was his name — or sometimes the name of Hatshepsut’s father, Tuthmosis I — that replaced Hatshepsut’s in her cartouches. There are two different views that have been advanced to explain the motive. 

One view is that Hatshepsut had to be eradicated because the very notion of a female pharaoh violated the natural order. Such an aberration had to be denied as if it had never been. Other scholars insist that the explanation had more to do with dynastic politics than with revulsion. They point out that Tuthmosis III reigned for twenty years before he issued his anti-Hatshepsut decree. That seems a long time to put a vendetta on hold. The real issue, according to these skeptics, was who would rule next. Some historians believe that there were rival candidates. One was Tuthmosis’s son; the others were more closely related to Hatshepsut and therefore boasted better bloodlines. What better way for Tuthmosis to smooth the way for his own son to succeed him than by ensuring that no rival could stake a claim of his own?

Even if all Hatshepsut’s statues had survived intact, we would not know what she looked like. This is because, in Ancient Egypt rulers were depicted as idealized types rather than individuals. Kings who had grown old and feeble were portrayed as young and imposing; so were little boys who happened to have inherited the throne. Archaeologists have devoted endless hours to piecing together Hatshepsut’s vandalized statues. Hatshepsut is depicted sometimes as male, sometimes as female, and sometimes as a female with the traditional trappings of male authority, including a royal goatee. 

The best of the statues are treasures of world art. The most striking of all is an eleven-foot-long, seven-ton granite sphinx with Hatshepsut’s face (and royal headdress and beard) and a lion’s body which is kept at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art. It was created more than three and a half millennia ago, at a site six thousand miles from its present home. Much of its story remains a mystery. But what we do know, we owe to Champollion noticing a tiny letter T, in a place where it did not belong.

Hatshepsut - I of II

In George Orwell's novel, 1984, the memory hole is a system used by the Party to destroy documents and alter history, ensuring that the only reality is what the Party dictates. The protagonist Winston Smith's job involves receiving original documents that he is required to alter according to strict instructions. Once he has rewritten history according to the Party's requirements, the original documents are shoved into the memory hole and incinerated. It's as if the past never happened. It symbolizes the control of information and the past, erasing any evidence that contradicts the Party's current narrative.

During the political purges of Joseph Stalin, he attempted to erase some figures from Soviet history by altering images and destroying film. Trotsky was a founder of the Soviet state, the first commander of the Red Army, playing a major role in the Russian Civil War, and he was a long-standing member of the Politburo. Stalin viewed him as a leading competitor for power, and once he came to power, ordered Trotsky's name and image to be thoroughly erased from Soviet history.

On May 5, 1920, Lenin gave a famous speech to a crowd of Soviet troops in Sverdlov Square, Moscow. In the foreground were Leon Trotsky and Lev Kamenev another person who had fallen from favor. The photo was later altered and both were removed by censors. Stalin had written glowingly in 1918 about the revolutionary contributions by Trotsky but he denied their special value by 1924. The Trotsky that  Stalin had written about glowingly in 1918 ceased to exist.

Hannah Arendt states that the “chances of factual truth surviving the onslaught of power are very slim indeed; it is always in danger of being maneuvered out of the world not only for a time but, potentially, forever.” Attempts to rewrite history for political ends are not merely a product of the last couple of centuries. There was an ancient precursor of the Stalinist technique of rewriting history by cropping political figures from photos when they fell from favor the Egyptian Pharaoh, Hatshepsut. 

Since his boyhood, Champollion had dreamed of seeing Egypt with his own eyes but had never been able to afford an Egyptian trip. (His enemies delighted in mocking him for posing as an expert on a land where he had never set foot.) Finally, in 1828, he made it. He was thirty-seven years old. At every juncture along the way he had read inscriptions carved into temples, tombs, and monuments. (It should be noted that he was the only person in the world who could have done so.) Then, in June 1829, while reading inscriptions at the site called Deir el-Bahri, near the Valley of the Kings, he found himself bewildered. He found mentions of a king he had never heard of. 

This bearded king was in the usual dress of the Pharaohs but the nouns and verbs were in the feminine, as though a queen were in question. For example, a message carved into a temple wall carried a warning: “He who shall do her homage shall live, he who shall speak evil in blasphemy of Her Majesty shall die.” The warning itself wasn’t a surprise. The surprise was the forthright declaration of just who was issuing the warning — Her Majesty.

Egypt had had female rulers — Cleopatra would be the most famous — but nearly all of them had been married to a pharaoh or ruled in the name of a royal prince too young to take the throne. Who was this unknown ruler? The mystery would not be solved until a century after Champollion’s death. For nearly twenty years, Egypt had been ruled by a female pharaoh — not just the wife of a ruler but a pharaoh in her own right — whose existence later rulers had tried to delete from history. This was Hatshepsut. 

The clues that Champollion had spotted were so subtle that others may have missed it but by this point he had come to a deep understanding of Egyptian grammar. He found that Egyptian took great pains with gender distinctions. In Hatshepsut’s temple, Champollion had seen that the word for king was followed by a feminine marker, the bread loaf hieroglyph that stood for the sound t. That tiny change transformed the familiar word "king" to something bizarre which startled Champollion.