Jack McCoy and his people have a brief discussion of Fritz Haber, the German chemist who got the Nobel Prize in 1918, and also invented poison gases which were used by Germany in war and in the Holocaust (later). The reason Haber won the Prize was entirely different: he developed a chemical reaction to convert atmospheric nitrogen (N2 gas) into fixed nitrogen (nitrogen atoms bound to atoms other than another nitrogen atom, as in ammonia, NH3), which enabled people to make artificial fertilizer from the nitrogen in the air, rather than having to use previously-living material, such as excrement and dead things, for fertilizer. This invention saved millions of people, maybe billions, from starving to death. It was so colossally important that the Nobel Prize committee had to award him the prize even in spite of his involvement with the poison-gas industry. So they held their noses (ha ha) and gave him the prize.
Later in his career, Haber wasted huge amounts of time and resources trying to find a way to extract gold from seawater. No fooling, he really thought there was enough gold in seawater to make the project practical, and hoped to enable Germany to pay off the judgment against it for WW1, which was required to be paid in gold, by getting the gold from seawater. This makes him--one man-- one of the most beneficial chemists, and one of the most evil chemists, and one of the most ridiculous chemists, in history.