A physicist who never lost her humanity

Lise Meitner was born on 7 November 1878, into a Jewish family as the third of eight children in Vienna.

Meitner studied physics and became the second woman to obtain a doctoral degree in physics at the University of Vienna in 1905. During the first years she worked together with chemist Otto Hahn and discovered with her several new isotopes. They discovered nuclear fission, but Lise wasn’t awarded the Nobel Prize because she was Jewish and had to escape from Nazi Berlin. Hahn took this not included in the research for the Nobel Prize in Chemistry.

She suggested the existence of nuclear fission chain. The chemical element of atomic number 109 was named meitnerium in her honour.

She decided to retire in 1960 and then moved to the UK. She died on October 27 at the age of 89. As was her wish, she was buried in the village of Bramley in Hampshire, at St James parish church, close to her younger brother Walter. Her nephew Otto Robert Frish composed the inscription on her headstone.

It reads: "Lise Meitner: a physicist who never lost her humanity "