The 1944 Nobel Prize in Chemistry went to Otto Hahn, and Meitner was overlooked. Partly, this was due to the fact that it had been politically impossible to co-publish the original paper with a Jewish woman living in an Allied country, but Meitner’s involvement and her other publications on the subject were well known. It seems that Hahn may have intentionally downplayed her role in the research. 22 years later she would receive the Enrico Fermi award alongside Hahn, but that initial snub is still seen as one of the most glaring mistakes in the history of the Nobel committee.
Even so, Meitner has been honored in countless other ways, from being named Woman of the Year by the National Press Club, to having libraries named for her, to receiving several honorary doctorates. In 1997, decades after her death, a synthetic element with 109 protons was named Meitnerium in her honor. Though the naming of element 101-109 caused significant controversy within the chemical community, the name Meitnerium was accepted without argument.
Like Einstein himself, Meitner was ruthless in her condemnation of those scientists who stayed behind to continue work under the Nazi regime and who never spoke up against it. This included her old friend Otto Hahn. Theirs was an odd relationship, and though he would always refer to her as a lifelong friend, Meitner’s confessed guilt at having stayed so long in Germany before fleeing was perhaps projected somewhat onto him. She wrote to him: “You all worked for Nazi Germany. And you tried to offer only a passive resistance. Certainly, to buy off your conscience you helped here and there a persecuted person, but millions of innocent human beings were allowed to be murdered without any kind of protest being uttered.” This unequivocal condemnation of cooperation with the Nazis is very like Einstein’s, though informed by far more personal experience.
Meitner continued to work as a researcher and lecturer for more than 20 years after the discovery of fission, before retiring in 1960. In her old age, after several health problems, the death of Otto Hahn was kept from her, for fear that the news would be too much. She died in 1968, at the age of 89.
Lise Meitner remains one of the most inspiring figures in science, specifically because she was so thoroughly excluded throughout her career. She somewhat rode a wave of reforms that saw research and academia open to women, but with Marie Curie she was perhaps the single most important figure to drive that wave forward, and to make it impossible to deny the rightful place of women in the university. She worked with little recognition, and often with even less pay, driven seemingly only by her love of physics and desire to continue in the spirit of her old teacher Ludwig Boltzmann, who had first showed her how science could provide the feeling that “a completely new and wonderful world had been revealed.”
Though Lise Meitner would not not always feel that her work was used to make the world more wonderful, her contributions have left it richer, nonetheless.
Now read: Giants of Science: Gregor Mendel