Abstract
WHEN, on November 7, Dr. Lise Meitner celebrates her seventieth birthday, her many friends will offer her their warmest congratulations and respectful admiration on a life of great activity, during which she has maintained the highest reputation for experimental discoveries in radioactivity and nuclear physics. Dr. Meitner studied under Boltzmann in Vienna. Moving to Berlin, she was for a time ‘Assistent' to Planck. She then joined Otto Hahn and thus began a long and rich collaboration, ended only by her flight from the Nazi regime. Her investigations during this period of about thirty years are so many and so varied that only a few can be mentioned here. An early joint paper on the absorption of β-rays was followed by the discovery, with von Baeyer, of homogeneous groups in the β-ray emission from radioactive bodies. This opened up a new field, to which she returned again and again in subsequent years, taking a leading part in the elucidation of β- and γ-ray spectra and in the study of the properties of β- and γ-rays. To the earlier period of collaboration belongs also the discovery of protoactinium in 1918. In later years she worked with Hahn, and also with Strassmann, on the neutron-induced radioactivity of uranium. After Hahn and Strassmann had discovered the presence of active barium in irradiated uranium, and thereby established the division of the uranium nucleus, Dr. Meitner and her nephew O. R. Frisch gave, in a letter in Nature in March 1939, the first physical picture of the fission process, introducing the term ‘fission' and making an estimate of the energy liberation. Using the method of recoil, which she and Hahn had applied so effectively in the early days of radioactivity, she was later able to show that the bodies previously called ‘transuranic' did, in fact, originate by fission. Since 1939, Dr. Meitner has worked in Stockholm, Where she now directs a small but active laboratory. Enjoying good health and abundant energy she can, While looking back on a life full of high achievement, also look forward to further years of happiness and success.
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Dr. Lise Meitner. Nature 162, 726–727 (1948). https://doi.org/10.1038/162726c0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/162726c0