Lise Meitner was an Austrian-born, later Swedish physicist who studied radioactivity and nuclear physics. She  was part of the team that discovered nuclear fission, an achievement for which her colleague Otto Hahn was awarded the Nobel Prize. Some historians of science view Meitner as one of the most glaring examples of scientific achievement overlooked by the Nobel committee, due in part to the fact that she was a woman.

At the end of 1907, Meitner came to Berlin from Vienna and  began more than thirty years' collaboration with the German chemist Otto Hahn. Their joint work embraced: investigations on beta-rays, their absorbability, magnetic spectra, etc.; use of the radioactive recoil, discovered shortly before by Hahn, to obtain new radioactive transformation products. In 1912 the research group Hahn-Meitner moved to the newly founded Kaiser-Wilhelm-Institut (Emperor Wilhelm Institute - KWI)in Berlin-Dahlem, in southwest in Berlin. She worked without salary as "guest" in Hahn's department of radiochemistry. It was not until 1913, at the age of 35, that Meinter got a permanent position at KWI due to an offer to go to Prague as associate professor.

Jointly with Hahn and his pupil and assistant Fritz Strassmann (1902-1980), Meitner furthered the research begun by Enrico Fermi and his team in 1934 when they bombarded uranium with neutrons. Until 1938, it was believed that the elements with atomic numbers greater than 92 (known as transuranium elements) arise when uranium atoms are bombarded with neutrons.

At the same time, Hitler was imposing increasing restrictions on "non-Aryan" scientists.  On 13 July 1938, with the help and support of Hahn, Lise Meitner, who was at great risk as she was of Jewish ancestry and had lost her Austrian citizenship after the Anschluss (the 1938 annexation of Austria into Greater Germany by the Nazi regime), emigrated to Stockholm, Sweden by crossing the German-Dutch border illegally.

Meitner continued her work at Manne Siegbahn's institute in Stockholm, but with little support, partially due to Siegbahn's prejudice against women in science. Hahn and Meitner met clandestinely in Copenhagen in November to plan a new round of experiments. The experiments that provided the evidence for nuclear fission were done at Hahn's laboratory in Berlin. On 22 December 1938, Hahn and Fritz Strassmann sent a manuscript to Naturwissenschaften reporting their radiochemical results, which were the irrefutable proof that the uranium had been split into fragments consisting of lighter elements; simultaneously, they communicated these results to Lise Meitner in Sweden.  Meitner, and her nephew, the young physicist Otto Robert Frisch, correctly interpreted these results as being nuclear fission, a term coined by Frisch, which subsequently became internationally known. Frisch confirmed this experimentally on 13 January 1939. Most historians of science agree that the proof of fission required Meitner's and Frisch's physical insight as much as the chemical findings of Hahn and Strassmann.

Hahn published the chemical evidence for fission without listing Meitner as a co-author.  Some argue that he did so to protect her given the situation in Nazi Germany. Others argue that Hahn deliberately omitted Meitner's contribution, particularly after the war when he repeatedly maintained that his chemical experiments verifying fission had never been inspired or guided by Meitner.

In 1944, Hahn received the Nobel Prize for Chemistry for the discovery of nuclear fission. Some historians who have documented the history of the discovery of nuclear fission believe Meitner should have been awarded the Nobel Prize with Hahn. In 1966 Hahn, Fritz Strassmann and Meitner together were awarded the Enrico Fermi Award. On a visit to the USA in 1946 she received American press celebrity treatment as someone who had "left Germany with the bomb in my purse." She was honored as "Woman of the Year" by the National Women's Press Club (USA) in 1946, and received the Max Planck Medal of the German Physics Society in 1949.  In 1997, element 109 was named meitnerium in her honor.

Sources

• Maisel, Merry and Laura Smart (1997), Women in Science: A Selection of 16 Significant Contributors, San Diego Supercomputer Center, La Jolla, CA.
• Sime, Ruth Lewin (2006), "Lise Meitner" in OUT OF THE SHADOWS: Contributions of 20th Century Women to Physics, Nina Byers and Gary Williams, ed., Cambridge University Press.
• Sime, Ruth Lewin (1996), Lise Meitner: A Life in Physics. Berkeley: University of California Press. ISBN 0-520-08906-5.
• Sime, Ruth Lewin (2005), From Exceptional Prominence to Prominent Exception: Lise Meitner at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Chemistry, Ergebnisse 24 Forschungsprogramm Geschichte der Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gesellschaft im Nationalsozialismus (2005).
• Wikipedia Contributors, Lise Meitner, Wikipedia The Free Encyclopedia, Accessed 28 October 2008.