Prussian

If Yuval Noah Harari is named the most influential historian from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Benjamin Labatut would have been the Chilean counterpart of him.

One of Benjamin Labatut's "works of fiction based on real event", When We Cease to Understand the World, chronicles the complicated links between scientists and Frankenstein.  

Think about the pigment Prussian blue. That's one of the sensational colours used by Van Gogh (think Starry Night) and Katsushika Hokusai (think The Great Wave off Kanagawa). The dye was discovered by the dyer Johann Jacob Diesbach by accident: his aim had been to mimic the ruby red made by crushing female insect carapaces in a laboratory set up by the alchemist Johann Konrad Dippel. Diesbach tried to pour potash contaminated with animal byproducts from some of Dipple's grosteque experiments, and ended up yielding the legendary blue. Dubbed "Prussian Blue," the creation was thought to be a fabled hue of the ancient Egyptians. 

Soon, another chemist stirred a pot of Prussian blue with a spoon of sulphuric acid, and created a new compound prussic acid, also known as Zyklon B. That is the way hydrogen cyanide poison came to leave its residue on the bricks of Auschwitz, ending million of lives in gas chambers.

The rest is history.