Lise Meitner is missing. Her name is not on the Monument to X-Ray and Radium Martyrs of all Nations in Hamburg, though the names of more than 350 other scientists and medics are. You won’t find her on the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe in Berlin, she is not anywhere among those three million names. She is not listed as a Nobel Prize for Physics winner, or among the household name of science. There is no record of Lise Meitner in any of these places, when it might so easily have been in all of them.
She was born in 1878 in Vienna, to a lawyer father and a mother who had fled pogroms against Russian Jews. At that time, women were not permitted to study at the city’s university and the prospect of any of the Meitners’ five daughters receiving an education beyond the age of 14 was remote. Even after restrictions were relaxed, the Meitners were compelled to hire private tutors to help their daughters cram eight years of learning into just two, in the hope of passing the university entrance exam.
Meitner gained admission to the University of Vienna in 1901 and a PhD (in physics) by 1906, only the second woman in the five hundred year history of the university to do so. She again defied expectations when moving to study in Berlin, aged 29, where she would eventually come to work at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute (KWI). She developed an international reputation in the field of atomic research, and became the first woman in Germany to become a professor. She also gained a reputation for meticulousness, for keeping a fastidiously well-ordered laboratory, and minimising exposure to dangerous radioactive materials. This, ultimately, would prevent her appearing on that roll-call of martyrs to their science.
You can perhaps see this tendency in photographs of her. In one, from 1913, she looks on with eyes darkened by the monochrome photography, black hair up and parted in the centre, a high collared dress. She looks modest, perhaps deferential. Meticulous. She is with her collaborator and colleague Otto Hahn; louche, confident, reading notes whilst leant back on a workbench.
Together Hahn and Meitner would unlock the process of nuclear fission – splitting the atom – in 1938. But on the cusp of their profound discovery Meitner was forced to flee persecution, just as her mother had fled Russia. Despite converting from Judaism to Christianity in 1908, and her status as a world leading scientist, by this time there was no future for anyone of Jewish descent in Germany. Crossing the border into the Netherlands with just ten Marks and scant belongings, she eventually made her way to Stockholm. In doing so she avoided becoming one of the sorrowful millions to die in the Nazi holocaust – another list of names that she would not appear on.
Even with her absence from the laboratory that had until recently born her name, Meitner was able to describe the process of the splitting of the atom from the chemical reports Hahn sent her from Berlin. Perhaps this distance, and a generosity in giving credit to others, meant that by 1945, when the Nobel Committee again convened to award prizes, Meitner’s name was missed out. Hahn was given the credit. Though she would work on, her name would fade from history.
But Lise Meitner can be found. Meitnerium, element 109, is named in her honour. Institutions are taking her name as her achievements are acknowledged. And her name can be found inscribed on a headstone in England, where she died in an old age no one could have expected her to see.
J R Vincent 