Justus von Liebig

So he is teaching chemistry, mathematics, and philosophy are the things that he teaches.

By 1844, he has taught enough chemistry from a textbook by a guy named Justus von Liebig, the father of organic chemistry, that he thinks, if I want to up my academic game and not teach in Delaware anymore, I should go to Germany and study with this guy.

So he borrows some money, goes to Germany, and gets into Justus von Liebig's library at Gießen in Hesse-Darmstadt.

And there he works on agricultural chemistry.

He measures the nitrogen content of plants.

People are also a resource.

[laughs] Wealth is also held, um, you know, if you're familiar with the night soilers or, uh, the work of Justus Liebig, like within the soil, the earth itself.

So you're not just transferring goods.

You can move people around, you know.

In 1840, a professor of chemistry at Gysin, a small university town in Hesse, owed the British Association a report.

At one of its meetings, the association's chemical section had asked Justus von Liebig to report on the state of organic chemistry.

He sent a book instead.

It came out in London that year as Organic Chemistry in Its Applications to Agriculture and Physiology, edited in English by his student Lion Playfair.

Yeah.

So I, I wanna say this about the previous question, and that is, how'd we get here? Justus von Liebig in 1837 with his vacuum tubes brought a new notion to the world that all of life is simply a reconfiguration of nitrogen, potassium- And phosphorus, NPK

Yep

And it was the first time in human history that a mechanical approach to life was, was given to the world.

Specifically, the crisis of British agriculture in the 19th century.

Marx was obsessively reading a German chemist named Justus von Liebig.

A chemist?

Yes.

A metà dell'800 in Europa nasce la biochimica.

Tra i suoi protagonisti c'è il tedesco Justus von Liebig.

È convinto che le proteine siano i macronutrienti più importanti.

Dice che sono gli unici capaci di fare due cose insieme: fornire energia e costruire muscoli.

E siccome le proteine si trovano soprattutto nella carne, che ai tempi è rara e costosa, Liebig inventa un sostituto, l'estratto di carne, un concentrato di proteine di origine animale ottenuto facendo bollire a lungo le carcasse di bovini scartate da altre filiere.

La notizia di questa invenzione fa il giro del mondo e arriva fino in Uruguay alle orecchie di un ingegnere ferroviario tedesco, Georg Christian Gilbert.

Gilbert ogni giorno vede marcire lungo i binari le carcasse delle vacche allevate per il cuoio.

Il freddo artificiale all'epoca non esiste ancora e quelle carcasse sono inutilizzabili.