Lise Meitner Helped Discover Nuclear Fission, but Despite 49 Nominations, Never Won a Nobel Prize for Her Genius

• Lise Meitner identified the fission process when her male colleagues could not figure it out.

• Her close colleague, Otto Hahn, downplayed the important role she played in the discovery.

• In 1944, Hahn won a Nobel Prize for the discovery. Meitner was nominated, but did not win.

The discovery of nuclear fission was one of the greatest scientific milestones of the 20th century. It led to the nuclear bomb nuclear energy, and a Nobel Prize in 1944 for the German chemist Otto Hahn.

But Lise Meitner, Hahn's longtime colleague and collaborator who actually identified and scientifically explained the process of nuclear fission, was nominated for a Nobel that same year, but did not win.

"Every physicist knew this was her work and she deserved that award," Marissa Moss, a biographer of Meitner, told Business Insider, adding that she thinks the reason Meitner was overlooked was a matter of sexism and anti-Semitism used to be.

"I think it's very easy to sideline a Jewish woman," Moss said.

Meitner was highly respected by other physicists - Einstein called her "our Marie Curie" - and compared her to the groundbreaking two-time Nobel laureate.

Over the course of her career, Meitner was nominated for a Nobel Prize 49 times without winning, but the 1944 prize ranks as the most glaring mistake in her brilliant career.

Meitner had to flee Nazi Germany

Meitner, Jewish and born in Austria, was the first female professor of physics in Germany.

She headed the radiophysics department of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in Berlin. Hahn was head of radiochemistry and would later become director of the institute. They collaborated often over the years, including co-discovering the element protactinium in the late 1910s.

In the 1930s their collaboration continued with research into transuranic elements. The idea was that bombarding uranium with neutrons could produce new, heavier elements called transuranic elements.

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But when Hitler came to power, Meitner's position became weak; she lost her professorship in 1933 and was only allowed to stay in Berlin because of her Austrian citizenship. After the German annexation of Austria in 1938, Meitner fled to Sweden.

'All her Jewish colleagues left years before she did. She just stuck around because she had a community and a job to do," Moss said.

Meitner, exiled to Sweden, maintained correspondence with Hahn. At Meitner's urging, he and chemist Fritz Strassman continued their experiments with uranium. Then in December 1938 she received a letter from Hahn describing a puzzling experimental result.

Hahn had discovered nuclear fission, but was not sure about it

Hahn's letter detailed that their experiments in bombarding uranium with neutrons appeared to produce barium as a product. There was no ready explanation for this result, since barium is a much lighter element than uranium, and the scientists expected to produce heavier elements, and not lighter ones.

Hahn wrote to Meitner: "Maybe you can come up with a fantastic explanation. We know for ourselves that things cannot really fall apart in Ba."

Before Meitner could respond, Hahn and Strassman published their results, but with no explanation for what they thought happened - and their paper made no mention of Meitner's role in the experiments.

"You have to understand that he really couldn't name Meitner because you couldn't tell he was working with a Jew," Moss said. 'He already wrote her letters complaining that he had collaborated with her and damaged his reputation at the institute. At large institute dinners, he sat at smaller tables and did not receive the accolades he deserved because he was working with a Jew. And that wasn't a good thing."

Meitner continued to think about Hahn's findings and, while discussing them with her cousin, physicist Otto Frisch, came to the idea that if an atomic nucleus were imagined as a liquid droplet, energetic neutrons might be able to separate the uranium nucleus into different parts and produce lighter elements could produce. - the process of nuclear fission.

Meitner uses Einstein's famous equation E=mc^2 to explain the reaction mathematically, the atoms formed after uranium split apart weighed slightly less than the original uranium atoms - and the missing mass had been converted into pure energy.

In February 1939, Meitner and Frisch published their article on nuclear fission in the scientific journal Nature, just a month after Hahn's article.

Overlooked for the Nobel Prize

Hahn received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1944 for the discovery of nuclear fission. Meitner was nominated in the physics category, but did not win despite her crucial role in verifying and explaining the discovery. Strassman and Frisch were also overlooked for a Nobel Prize.

An analysis of the Nobel Committee data published in Physics Today concluded that one of the reasons Meitner was overlooked was "a general inability of the evaluation committees to estimate the extent to which the German persecution of the Jews affected the published scientific record was crooked."

Since 1901, more than 621 Nobel Prizes have been awarded in the fields of physics, chemistry, medicine, literature, peace and economics. Of those 621 awards, only 65 have gone to women - about 10%.

More than twenty years later, in 1966, Meitner, Strassmann and Hahn all received the Enrico Fermi Prize for their discovery.

But Hahn had downplayed Meitner's role for years. She was called his mitarbeiterin in the German press and in a museum exhibit of the device used to detect nuclear fission - a word that "can be interpreted as assistant," Moss said.

Hahn did nothing to dispel the idea that Meitner played a minor role in the discovery.

"She was very hurt by that," Moss said.

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