Lise Meitner Gets Screwed Out of a Nobel Prize

On This Day in History: November 15, 1945

Many know the story of how Rosalind Franklin got hosed out of her share of the credit for understanding the structure of DNA. You think that sort of thing only happened once? Heh. Let me introduce you to super scientist Lise Meitner, who absolutely should have shared a Nobel Prize for the discovery of nuclear fission. Except some dude got all the credit.

--On This Day in History Shit Went Down: November 15, 1945--

Franklin died young of ovarian cancer before ever learning how much Watson and Crick relied on her work and seeing them get a Nobel. But Meitner lived to be 89 and was nominated for a Nobel dozens of times in both chemistry and physics, never once winning. The circumstances of the 1944 award stand out as a what-the-fucking-fuck level of injustice.

Born in Vienna in 1878, Meitner had a long and distinguished scientific career and won numerous prestigious awards (just not a Nobel). She collaborated with German chemist Otto Hahn for decades, researching all sorts of fancy science shit about bombarding elements with neutrons to produce new isotopes, or something. Anyway, then the fucking Nazis happened.

Being Jewish, when the fucking Nazis took over Austria in 1938 Meitner lost her citizenship. With the help of a fellow professor she made a daring escape to the Netherlands and then Sweden. While she lived in exile, Hahn and another German chemist, Fritz Strassmann, continued the research, looking at the explodey stuff—uranium. Bombardment of uranium caused it to do weird radioactive shit, but the two men couldn’t interpret the results, so they wrote letters to Meitner in Sweden and said what the fuck we don’t get it.

She chatted about it with her physicist nephew, Otto Frisch, and they went in the opposite direction of the prevailing wisdom regarding nuclear transmutation. They decided hey—that goddamn uranium nucleus is splitting in half and releasing a metric shit-ton of energy in the process. To describe the process they borrowed from biology, calling it “nuclear fission,” publishing an article in early 1939 in the scientific journal Nature.

Then Albert Einstein, who was a big fan of Meitner’s, wrote a letter to President Roosevelt saying hey you know this idea could be used to make a mega bomb that you could use to blow up fucking Nazis. The only reason the resulting Manhattan Project bombs weren’t dropped on fucking Nazis was because they were defeated before the bombs were ready. Don’t kid yourself. If Germany had still been in the fight, the U.S. totally would have nuked them.

Anyway, let’s on-this-day this motherfucker. November 15, 1945, was when the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences decided to award the 1944 Nobel Prize for Chemistry to Otto Hahn, and Otto Hahn alone. Strassmann was probably left off due to not being a senior scientist, but the exclusion of Lise Meitner from sharing the prize with Hahn was an injustice. After the war, Meitner was celebrated as “The Jewish mother of the bomb,” although she was adamant that she wanted nothing to do with the creation of such a device.

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