Lise Meitner and the Dawn of the Nuclear Age (review)

Lise Meitner was an amazing woman. Despite the dual disadvantages of being female and Jewish, the Austrian-born physicist established a first-class career starting in the 1910s and 1920s in Berlin, where such luminaries as Max Planck and Albert Einstein were developing a new quantum-based physics. Working both independently and with chemist Otto Hahn, through the 1930s Meitner was part of the worldwide effort to investigate radioactive substances (she and Hahn were codiscoverers of the element protactinium in 1917). In 1938, at the age of sixty, she fled first to the Netherlands, then to Scandinavia to escape Nazi persecution. After settling in Sweden, she managed to reestablish her research program, even though she was living and working in a foreign country where she did not speak the language, received low pay, and lacked good laboratory equipment

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