In the very new but ongoing series on how women are the coolest (no bias here, you understand,) I have a new entry. There’s a lot of science in this entry, and I tried my best to condense it all, but to understand it fully, you’ll have to do some extra research into the subject.
Lise Meitner (1878-1968) was born in Austria into a Jewish family. She got a PhD in 1906, a feat in itself for a turn-of-the century woman, and started working with Otto Hahn in Germany shortly after.
In 1913, the element brevium was discovered, In 1917, the Meitner and Hahn discovered a long-living isotope of the element and renamed it protactinium. In the 1930’s the neutron was discovered, and the race was on to find out if it was possible to create elements heavier than uranium.
Let me state here that no one at the time thought they were essential to helping make the nuclear bomb. Science should be fun and exciting, not destructive.
Then Hitler came into power. Even though Meitner became a Protestant when she was 29, and she was Austrian, not German, she fled to Sweden in 1938 before she was caught by the Nazis. Later that year, Hahn come to Copenhagen to work secretly with Meitner, who was instrumental in discovering that uranium could be split, thereby providing the evidence for nuclear fission (Hahn didn’t believe it was possible.) All the work on nuclear fission was done in Hahn’s lab in Germany and Meitner wasn’t there physically, so when it came time to nominate scientists for the Nobel Prize, the Nobel committee couldn’t understand Meitner’s role in the whole process. Because of that, she was not included in the Nobel Prize for Chemistry that Hahn won in 1944.
Meitner never worked on nuclear fission in order to make nuclear weapons. Neither did the other scientists at the time. Over time, however, some scientists (including Hahn) ended up working for Nazi Germany.
Meitner was reportedly nominated for the Nobel Prize 13 times but never won. However, she, Hahn and Fritz Strassman (who worked with them) received the Enrico Fermi Award in 1966 in the US. (According to Meitner, when she visited the US, she was treated as though she had “left Germany with the bomb in my purse.”) In 1982, German scientists made and identified element 109 on the periodic table. In 1992, meitnerium was suggested as a name, after Lise Meitner, a fitting honor for one who contributed so much to the chemistry and physics worlds.
