Lise Meitner

Lise Meitner, left, and Otto Hahn stand at a bench in their laboratory at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Chemistry in Berlin in 1913, Hahn studying a sheet of paper while tall factory-style windows light the room. The physicist and the chemist worked as partners for about three decades. Hahn's later experiments with Fritz Strassmann revealed nuclear fission in 1938, and Meitner, by then in exile in Sweden, worked out with her nephew Otto Frisch what had actually happened inside the uranium nucleus.