Lise Meitner — Nuclear Physicist and Co-Discoverer of Fission
The Austrian and Swedish physicist whose interpretation of nuclear fission gave the process its name and its theory, and whose exclusion from the Nobel Prize became the most cited example of gender bias in the history of science. She worked for three decades in Berlin, fled Nazi persecution in 1938, and spent her later years in Sweden and Britain.
Events
Birth and Education in Vienna
Elise Meitner was born on 7 November 1878 in Vienna, the sixth of eight children of a Jewish lawyer who encouraged all his children to pursue an education. At a time when Austrian universities still barred women, she completed her secondary schooling through a teacher-training program and worked briefly as a private tutor and French teacher to fund further study.
Location: Vienna, Austria-Hungary
Berlin and the Partnership with Otto Hahn
In 1907 Meitner moved to Berlin, where she met chemist Otto Hahn at the University of Berlin, beginning a collaboration that would last three decades and end in the discovery of fission. Because women were barred from most laboratories, she worked for years in a converted basement space, unpaid at first, alongside Hahn in the chemistry institute.
Location: Berlin, Germany
Protactinium and International Recognition
During the First World War, Meitner served briefly as a radiological assistant with the Austrian army before returning to her Berlin laboratory. In 1917 and 1918 she and Hahn isolated a new radioactive element, protactinium-231, work she led largely on her own as Hahn moved to other projects; the discovery secured her international standing in radiochemistry.
Location: Berlin, Germany
A Professorship in Berlin
In 1926 the University of Berlin appointed Meitner to a professorship, and she is described as the first woman in Germany to hold a full professorship in physics. The position, delayed for years by institutional resistance to women in senior academic roles, recognized a decade of work that had made her laboratory one of the centers of European radioactivity research.
Location: Berlin, Germany
Dismissal Under the Nuremberg Laws
When the Nazi Party took power in 1933, Jewish colleagues including James Franck and Max Born left their Berlin positions; Meitner, born Jewish but a convert to Protestantism, was initially protected by her baptism, and stayed, later saying she did not want to abandon her work. The Nuremberg Laws of 1935 ended that shelter: she was forced out of her university post and barred from the physics section of the German Academy of Sciences, losing her salary and independence.
Location: Berlin, Germany
Escape from Nazi Germany
After Germany annexed Austria in March 1938, Meitner, now a stateless Jewish woman under Nazi law, lost her remaining protection. With help from the Dutch physicist Dirk Coster, she crossed the German-Dutch border on the night of 13-14 July 1938, leaving almost all her possessions behind, and traveled on to Stockholm, where she joined Manne Siegbahn's institute.
Location: Berlin to Stockholm, via the Netherlands
Naming Nuclear Fission
In mid-1938, months before Meitner's escape, Hahn and Fritz Strassmann in Berlin bombarded uranium with neutrons and found barium, a nucleus about half the mass of uranium, a result that defied the physics of the day. Hahn mailed his data to Meitner in Stockholm; over the New Year, walking with her nephew Otto Robert Frisch on the frozen river near Kungälv in Sweden, she worked out that the uranium nucleus had split, applying Einstein's E=mc2 to estimate the enormous energy released.
Location: Stockholm, Sweden
The Nobel Prize Goes to Hahn Alone
In November 1944 the Swedish Academy awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry to Otto Hahn alone for the discovery of nuclear fission; the prize was formally presented at the December 1945 ceremony, one year late because of the war, when Hahn accepted while Meitner, attending as a guest, was pointed out to the audience as the physicist who had fled the Nazis. The Nobel committee's files, opened decades later, showed that the physics prize had been considered for Meitner and Frisch, and that the chemistry award was made deliberately narrow.
Location: Stockholm, Sweden
Professor in Stockholm and Swedish Citizenship
Meitner led the physics department at the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm from 1947 to 1960, training a generation of Swedish and international physicists while continuing to write on nuclear structure. In 1949 she became a Swedish citizen while insisting she had never ceased to be Austrian, a dual identity that captured her displacement; she had been stateless for eleven years.
Location: Stockholm, Sweden
The Enrico Fermi Award
In 1966 the US Atomic Energy Commission awarded its Enrico Fermi Award jointly to Otto Hahn, Fritz Strassmann, and Lise Meitner, recognizing their roles in the discovery of nuclear fission; the prize, carrying 100,000 dollars, was presented by President Lyndon Johnson in a White House ceremony. It was, two decades late, the closest official vindication Meitner received for her part in the discovery.
Location: Washington, D.C., United States
Death in Cambridge
Lise Meitner died on 27 October 1968 in Cambridge, England, aged 89, and was buried at St James' Church in Bramley, Hampshire, near her nephew Otto Frisch. The inscription on her stone reads simply: "Lise Meitner, a physicist who never lost her humanity."
Location: Cambridge, England