1939: Lise Meitner’s Research and Discovery of Nuclear Fission

In 1945 the Nobel Prize for Chemistry was awarded to Otto Hahn for his research and discovery of nuclear fission. The physicist Lise Meitner, who played a key role in the process, went away empty-handed. As a woman and a Jew, Lise Meitner faced difficult conditions in her scientific career: born in Vienna in 1878, she was one of the first women to enrol at the University of Vienna. As the second female graduate of the Physics Institute, she worked as an (unpaid) assistant in Vienna and Berlin, and in 1926 she became the first female professor of physics in Germany. After having her teaching licence revoked in 1933, following the Nazi seizure of power, she still continued research, which in 1938 led to the discovery of nuclear fission (through her colleague Hahn). Meitner was already in exile in Sweden at this point, and in 1939 she wrote the authoritative article on the theoretical-physical foundation of nuclear fission. Meitner lived in Sweden and Britain after the Second World War. She died in Cambridge in 1968.