Lise Meitner defied regulations from the beginning. Born in Vienna, where women were excluded from secondary and higher education by law, Meitner continued her advanced education with the help of her family.
Luckily, by 1897, women were slowly being admitted to a number of faculties at the University of Vienna. In 1901, Meitner took the entrance exam and, in 1906, completed her PhD in physics. Although she was able to earn her degree, as a woman, she wasn’t allowed to work or be in the main building of universities or be paid. So, Meitner conducted experiments in the basement of the Chemical Institute of the University of Berlin, where she met radiochemist Otto Hahn (1879-1968).
For the next three decades, Meitner and Hahn collaborated, writing numerous groundbreaking papers. They began with jointly writing about the absorption of beta rays by matter. Beta rays simply refer to the emission of beta particles, which are fast-moving electrons that are emitted when a substance radioactively decays.
Meitner and Hahn chemically separated known substances from unknown ones and tracked their radiations. Doing so allowed them to identify new radioactive substances, but identification remained difficult because the radiations emitted weren’t unique to each substance.
However, the identification of isotopes and the discovery of the Group Displacement Law clarified the relationship between elements. The Group Displacement Law connects the positions of parent and daughter elements in radioactive day. An alpha-emitter decays into an element two places to the left in a row of the periodic table, and a beta-emitter decays into an element one place to the right.
While the Group Displacement Law helped order the uranium and thorium series, it somewhat complicated the actinium series. At the time, little was known about actinium relative to other radioactive elements. It was said to have a helf-life of around 25 years, thus it couldn’t be the parent element of its series. So, it needed to derive from an older element, but no one was sure which one.
This was the question that Meitner and Hahn set out to answer: which element was the starting point for the actinium series and through which intermediates is actinium derived? They began their work in the Kaiser Wilehlm Institute for Chemistry in Berlin-Dahlem, where Meitner got her first paid job. Within a year, she became a full member of the Institute and worked with Hahn in the radioactivity section, which became the institute’s most prominent lab.
In 1917, Meitner was appointed to Head of the Physical section of the Radioactive Unit at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Chemistry. In March of 1918, Meitner and Hahn submitted a paper claiming that they had discovered a new element called protactinium, and claimed that pitchblende (what we know call uraninite) was a starting material for the actinium series. In 1919, Meitner received the title of full professor.
From then on, Meitner’s career took off. In 1922, she received the venia legendi, which qualified her for university teaching, and in 1926, she was appointed to “extraordinary professor.” She led the development of radioactivity research and pioneered nuclear physics in Germany. Within this field, she was an expert in using the cloud chamber and Geiger counter (instruments for measuring ionizing radiation).
Between 1924 and 1948, Meitner was nominated 19 times for the Nobel Prize of Chemistry. And between 1937-1965, she was nominated 29 times for the Prize of Physics. However, her numerous nominations, Meitner was still notably excluded from the Nobel Prize of Chemistry in 1945. She was a key member of a team that discovered and named nuclear fission in December of 1938. However, due to a variety of political reasons and biases, Hahn didn’t include Meitner as an author in his first publication on the subject, and the Nobel Committee awarded the Nobel Prize of Chemistry to Hahn alone.
However, Meitner still received some posthumous recognition. In 1994, the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC) approved the name “meitnerium” for element 109.