Historical Figures

Lise Meitner, forgotten by the Nobel Prize

Lise Meitner is an Austrian-turned-Swedish physicist, known for her work in nuclear physics and for having played a major role in the discovery of nuclear fission. Forgotten by the Nobel Prize, she is one of the many women scientists whose work has not been recognized at its fair value.

The first female students of the Austrian university

Elise Meitner was born in Vienna (Austria), to a Jewish family, on November 7, 1878. Her parents, Hedwig Skovran and Philipp Meitner, a lawyer, have seven other children, four girls and three boys. All the siblings receive an intellectual education and encouragement to pursue higher studies; the Meitner girls thus benefited from a more advanced education than the average for young Austrian girls of the time.

The Austrian university opened to women in 1897; during the first years, to be admitted, candidates must pass the Matura (equivalent to the baccalaureate) as free candidates, the high school being closed to them until then. After two years of preparation in a small group of women, Lise was received in 1901 and entered the University of Vienna the same year. There she learned physics, chemistry, mathematics and botany before specializing in physics in the second year.

In December 1905, Lise obtained her doctorate with highest honors, which she completed on the conduction of heat in inhomogeneous solids. As a woman, she could hardly claim an academic career but, supported by her father, she continued her research activities despite everything and began to study radioactivity and the absorption of alpha radiation in metals. and beta. In 1907, she left for Berlin to follow Max Planck's classes, with the professor's agreement – ​​the university was not open to women. Max Planck would later become an important support for the young woman, although he was generally rather opposed to the education of women.

The “uranium project”

Lise Meitner quickly got noticed and received several job offers. She accepts a proposal for collaboration on radioactivity from the chemist Otto Hahn, in an institute directed by Emil Fischer. The latter does not look favorably on the arrival of a woman and does not facilitate this collaboration, relegating Lise and Otto to a laboratory in the basement. In 1912, Otto Hahn was hired at the newly created Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Chemistry, and Lise joined him there, first without pay and then as an assistant to Max Planck. She must receive a job offer in Prague to be promoted to partner the following year.

During the first two years of the First World War, Lise worked as a handler of X-ray equipment for the wounded at the front before resuming her research. In 1917, she became director of the physics department of her institute and continued her collaboration with Otto. Together, they discovered several isotopes, notably protactinium in 1918. In parallel, Lise also studied the spectra of beta and gamma radiation. In 1923, she discovered the non-radiative transition, which would later be called the Auger effect, in honor of the scientist who discovered this effect on his own… two years after Lise. In 1934, with Otto Hahn and the chemist Fritz Strassmann, she became involved in the "uranium project", which would discover nuclear fission a few years later.

The discovery of nuclear fission

After Adolf Hitler came to power, Jewish but relatively protected by her Austrian nationality, Lise Meitner managed to keep her job until 1938, while many Jewish scientists left Germany. Subsequently, for moral questions, she will express her great regret for having remained in Germany. During the Anschluss (annexation of Austria) in March 1938, her nationality no longer protected her and she decided to flee Germany. In July 1938, she went to Sweden and continued her research in a laboratory in Stockholm.

Lise continues her clandestine collaborations with German scientists, including Otto Hahn, with whom she works, like many other teams, on the laboratory production of elements heavier than uranium. It was Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassmann who carried out, in Berlin, the experiments planned with Lise, and who discovered the effects of bombarding uranium with neutrons. In the middle of World War II, the physicist cannot be among the co-authors of the publication, and her major role in the discovery is dismissed. Quickly, the scientific community realized that nuclear fission could have military uses. The Manhattan Project, which will lead to the development of nuclear weapons, is launched at Los Alamos; Lise refuses, for her part, to participate in the creation of a bomb.

In 1944, Otto Hahn received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. Nominated three times for the Nobel Prize, Lise Meitner will never receive it, but will obtain many other distinctions. In 1949, she took Swedish nationality. In 1960, she moved to England, where she died eight years later, on October 27, 1968.