The 2023 prize for mRNA vaccine developers is reminiscent of prizes to Fritz Haber (1918), Paul Müller (1948) and Antonio Moniz (1949) Without question, the German chemist Fritz Haber was a genius, but he was a spectacular example of a scientist whose work came unmoored from ethics. In reviewing his career, I am struck with both admiration and horror. On the one hand, Haber largely invented the Haber–Bosch process of synthesizing ammonia from nitrogen gas and hydrogen gas, which enabled the