–after Jewish female physicist, Lise Meitner
–Austrian born (November 1878), and later, a scientist in Germany, and, much later (post–1938) a Swedish theoretical physicist who studied radioactivity and nuclear physics.
Meitnerium was part of the small team which discovered nuclear fission. Her co–collaborator Otto Hahn received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1944, in–part for a paper submitted December 1938 (published in 1939) to the scientific periodical Naturwissenschaften (Germany). At that point (subsequent to the Anschluss March 11–12, 1938 in Austria) Meitner herself had been on the run from the Nazis since July, 1938, barely evading arrest. Her (blatant) exclusion from that year’s Nobel Prize has been challenged ever since. Otto Hahn continued to work for the Nazi government. The Nobel Prize Committee has yet to ‘explain itself’.
The physics ‘fraternity’ consequently gave her the extraordinary acclaim of naming an Element of the Universe after her. (Presumably having an Element named after you trumps winning the Nobel Prize…author—I hope all you Jewish mothers are listening…)
In 1917 Meitnerium and (the same) chemist Otto Hahn had discovered the first long–lived isotope of the element protactinum.
In 1923 she discovered the cause, now known as the Auger effect, of the emission from surfaces of electrons with “signature” energies. The effect is named, however, for Pierre Victor Auger, A French scientist who discovered the effect independently, but two years later, in 1925.
In 1933 she had been Acting Director of the Institute for Chemistry (Germany), protected somewhat at that point from the Nazis by her Austrian citizenship.
In 1946 named Woman of the Year by the National Press Club (USA).
In 1949 receives the Max Planck Medal of the German Physics Society.
In October 1968 she passes away in Cambridge, England (where she had resided for six years) shortly before her 90th birthday.
In 1996 she was a joint posthumous recipient of the Enrico Fermi Award (U.S. Government). 1996 (see heading of this Thunderation), 28 years after her death, was a good year for the legacy of Lise Meitner.
However, her other claim to world history may have been her pointed and quite–public castigation(s) from her position of eminence in the world scientific fraternity (which had at least twice robbed her of her due) of the ‘eminent’ German scientists who remained slavish servants of the Nazi regime through the brutal course of the war and the Holocaust, including Otto Hahn, her former collaborator in physics.
She (publicly) castigated Hahn in writing after the war—“You all worked for Nazi Germany. And you tried to offer only a passive resistance. Certainly, to buy off your conscience you helped here and there a persecuted person, but millions of innocent human beings were allowed to be murdered without any kind of protest being uttered… [it is said that] first you betrayed your friends, then your children in that you let them stake their lives on a criminal war – and finally that you betrayed Germany itself, because when the war was already quite hopeless, you did not once arm yourselves against the senseless destruction of Germany.”
– after Wikipedia