Lise Meitner

Eventually she decided to attend the Friedrich Wilhem university in Berlin, obtaining the opportunity to attend sophisticated lectures led by Max Planck, a theoretical physicist who changed our comprehension of atomic and subatomic occurrences in quantum energy; and she impressed him with her advanced knowledge and was unofficially hired as an assistant researcher. (2)

 

Furthermore, Lise began working with Otto Hahn, a chemist with whom she discovered several known isotopes in 1907. (which were back then thought to be radioactive elements although the concept of an isotope emerged in 1913 theorised by Frederick Soddy)

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Hahn used electroscopes measuring the alpha/beta particles plus the gamma rays in two private laboratories. What’s also interesting is that the pair had a wood shop and the laboratories to work with, as they were technically volunteers as they were doing unpaid work, and Meitner was only allowed to stay in the wood shop having no access to the other rooms of the institute including Hahn’s lab. If she needed a restroom, she had to go to a nearby restaurant down the street! (3)

The Kaiser Wilhelm Institute, where Otto Hahn was working at, officially hired her making her a permanent scientist at the institution once Prussian schools began accepting women, even installing women’s toilets in the building.

Hahn had always been interested in discovering more elements despite them actually being isotopes and Meitner wished to pursue radiations. Eventually they set up tests observing how radioactive ways could be a method of identifying radioactive substances, discovering two new isotopes. (4)

 

In 1914, when WW1 broke out, Lise served as a nurse for the injured soldiers but then went back to the laboratory in 1916. A year later, Lise and Hahn discovered element 231, protactnium’s isotope, winning the Leibitz medal awarded by the Berlin Academy Of Sciences. 

During the 1920s and 1930s, she began investigating nuclear chemistry focusing on radioactivity and the behaviour of atomic nuclei.

In 1937, as Adolf Hitler and the Nazi party were ascending into power, she had no choice but to flee Germany a year later due to the persecution of the Jewish community and she was officially dismissed from her job at the Institute in Berlin, with her name being permanently removed from official documents and papers filled with her findings. (5)

A year later during the month of December, Lise Meitner and her nephew Otto Frisch observed that a uranium nucleus had divided in two, a process which had always been thought to be impossible. They explained in physical terms the phenomenon as having an extra neutron was the primary cause for the uranium (element 92, U) to split into fragments of equal sizes releasing a high amount of energy during the process which she later named “nuclear fission”. Despite her significant contribution, which lead to the innovation of atomic weaponry adapting to the developed nuclear energy , she was never credited for the discovery and instead Otto Hann received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry (despite being somewhat involved, many believed she deserved most of the credit) in 1944 without even acknowledging her role in his speech. (6)

In the end, her true values were overshadowed by sexism, prejudice, and anti-semitism by the scientific community. Even after her death, many disregard her role in discovering nuclear fission  although despite not receiving a Nobel Prize, element 109, Meitnerium (Mt), was named after her. (7)

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With the element being extremely radioactive and not existing in nature, it is one of the only elements named after a female scientist along with Curium, recognising Marie Curie. In fact, she was nicknamed by Albert Einstein as “the German Marie Curie”, yet Meitner never reached the level of fame and respect as Curie did. (8)