Amazing Women in History: Lise Meitner

Hey Amanda,

Let me introduce you to Lise Meitner. She was a boss- for one she earned her doctoral degree in private because she wasn't allowed to actually attend the university that gave her her doctoral examination. She not only convinced Max Planck to permit her to attend his lectures (which he had previously denied to other women), but after a year, he made her his assistant.

She later switched to the lab of Otto Hahn and worked in the Radiochemistry department at the Kaiser Wilhem Institute for a year as a "guest" because they wouldn't pay her. But, she also convinced them that that was stupid.

She discovered several isotopes, the Auger effect, and the neutron. But, the Auger effect is named for a French man that discovered it a year after her. And the Nobel Prize of Physics for the discovery of the neutron was awarded to her research partner, Otto Hahn, alone. Not cool, patriarchy.

Lise Meitner is not impressed.
(Otto Hahn at her right)

Meitnered: vt.having one's accomplishments wrongfully assigned to someone else because one doesn't fulfill expectations for that accomplishment--often due to gender. See also Watson-Crick'sing

Dear Watson,
 Your welcome.
 P.S. No one calls me Rosie, especially not you,
 so you  should probably edit that out of  Double Helix

And although she and Hahn were close friends, Meitner didn't pull any punches. She wrote him a letter condemning his behavior during WWII, writing:

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 ... [it is said that] first you betrayed your friends, then your children in that you let them stake their lives on a criminal war – and finally that you betrayed Germany itself, because when the war was already quite hopeless, you did not once arm yourselves against the senseless destruction of Germany

Man.

Right, she was also a jew that fled Nazi Germany...twice. Once into the Netherlands, and then into Sweden after the invasion.

So yeah, women physicists. It's not just Marie Curie.

Have a great weekend,
Stephanie