BY: MADELINE MATOR

* EARLY LIFE  Meitner was born in a Jewish family in Vienna, Austria on November 7,  She was the third of eight children in her family.  Her original name was Elise Meitner but she shortened it to Lise.  Because of restrictions on female getting higher education, Lise only enter the University of Vienna in 1901

 Lise was the second woman to receive a doctoral degree in physics.  During Lise days, women weren’t allow to have a higher education.

* SCIENTIFIC CAREER  Inspired by her teacher, Meitner became a physicist after attending many of his lectures in Berlin.  In other to get a higher education, by the help of her father, Lise was able to travel to Berlin where she studied.  She completed her studies in 1901.

 While in Berlin, Lise began to work with a Chemist named Otto Hahn.  Lise worked as a guest without salary in Hahn Department of radioactivity.  In 1913, at the age of 35, Lise got a position in the Kaiser-Wilhelm Institute (KWI)

* When Adolf Hitler came to power, every Jewish scientists were dismissed, even Meitner’s nephew Otto Frisch. * Meitner was protected by her Austrian citizenship  In 1917, she and Hahn discovered the first lived isotope for the element protactinium and was awarded the Leibniz medal by the Berlin Academy of Sciences.  A few years later in 1922, she discovered the cause of emission from surfaces of electrons with signature energies which she called the Auger Effect.

* Nuclear Fission  The experiment performed by Hahn and Fritz, both Meitner’s partners isolated the evidence of nuclear fission  Later, Hahn recognition that fission was the only explanation for the barium and immediately, he wrote Meitner.

 The possibility that uranium nuclei might break apart under neutron bombardment had been suggested but by employing Bohr’s “liquid drop” model of the nucleus articulate the theory of how the nucleus of an atom could spilt into smaller parts.  Meitner and her nephew Otto Frisch correctly interpreted their result as nuclear fission and published their paper in Nature.

* Lise refused to work on the project at Los Alamos declaring that she didn’t want any involvement in the creation of bombs.  A few years later, after recognizing the possible chain reactions of enormous explosive potential. Knowing that it could be use as weapon against people, various scientist including Leo Szilard, Eugene Wigner and Edward Teller persuaded Einstein to write a later of caution to president Roosevelt which later begun the Manhattan project.

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