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Lise Meitner (1878 – 1968) Elise (»Lise«) Meitner was born into a well-to-do, liberal Jewish family in Vienna in 1878. She studied mathematics, physics and philosophy in Vienna and immediately began to work in research. In 1919 she became the Director of the Physical-Radioactivity Depart- ment of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Chemistry in Berlin. She was central to the dis- covery of nuclear fission in the 1930s. At the same time, her life in Nazi Germany was be- coming more and more difficult due to her Jewish background. In 1938 Lise Meitner emigrated to Stockholm. A committed pacifist, she campaigned for a peaceful use of nuclear fission all her life. In 1947, Lise Meitner was promoted to research professor at the Royal Institute of Tech- nology in Stockholm. She later also taught as a visiting professor in the U.S.A. After her retirement in 1960, she moved to be with her nephew in Cambridge (Great Britian). „I will have nothing to do with a bomb!“ (Lise Meitner’s response to being invited to work with Otto Robert Frisch and some other British scientists at Los Alamos during the Manhattan Project to create the atomic bomb in 1943)
