Being Pro-Semitic: Lise Meitner

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Jerry Brodsky is chair of FJMC’s Inclusion Initiative, president of the International Region and a member of KIO+ Region.

Lise Meitner (1878 – 1968), Jewish scientist who has an element on the Periodic Table named for her. In the Periodic Table of the Elements, there are two elements named after women scientists. The namesake of Curium is well known, but the other scientist is unjustly obscure– Austrian-born Jewish physicist Elise “Lise” Meitner, who overcame both the gender discrimination in academe and the antisemitism of Nazi Germany to make critical contributions in nuclear physics, including the discovery of the Meitner-Auger Effect and most notably, in discovering and identifying the process of nuclear fission. Overcoming the barriers to women in universities, she became the first woman to become a full Professor of Physics in Germany. Her early work was conducted at the University of Berlin, but when she lost her position under the Nuremburg Laws in 1935, she continued her scientific work in Sweden and England. In 1939, she and fellow physicist Otto Robert Frisch worked out the physics of nuclear fission through a new interpretation of earlier experimental data of her colleague Otto Hahn. It was In Meitner and Frisch’s report in the February 1939 issue of Nature that they gave the process the name fission. This discovery led to the harnessing of nuclear power. Though nominated 39 times for the Nobel Prize in physics and chemistry, she never received the award. However, in 1994 she was memorialized on the Periodic Table– Meitnerium (atomic no.109) was named in her honor.

David Rozenson submittal sourced from:
Her article on nuclear fission: http://www.nature.com/physics/looking-back/meitner/index.html
The Woman Behind the Bomb by Marcia Bartusiak
https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/style/longterm/books/reviews/lisemeitner.html
Nominations for Nobel Prize: https://www.nobelprize.org/nomination/archive/show_people.php?id=6097
UCLA Archive: “Contributions of 20th-Century Women to Physics”
">http://cwp.library.ucla.edu/Phase2/Meitner%