The Woman Who Split the Atom: The Life of Lise Meitner by Marissa Moss

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Woman Who Split the Atom: The Life of Lise Meitner by Marissa Moss Elizabeth Bush Moss, Marissa The Woman Who Split the Atom: The Life of Lise Meitner; written and illus. by Marissa Moss. Abrams, 2022 [264p] Trade ed. ISBN 9781419758539 $19.99 E-book ed. ISBN 9781683358275 $15.54 Reviewed from digital galleys R Gr. 5-9 Paternal encouragement and financial support enabled Austrian-born Lise Meitner to pursue her dream of becoming a physicist in an early twentieth-century world reluctant to allow women to enter universities, much less male-run labs. With a toe in the door at the University of Berlin, Meitner secured an unpaid assistantship [End Page 256] to Otto Hahn, a peer in age but worlds ahead of her in professional credibility. Meitner and Hahn settled into a long-standing, if tenuous, work friendship, but the writing was on the wall that this relationship was doomed to end badly. Meitner bowed out of war work while Hahn supported German development of chemical weapons in World War I, and his efforts to protect his Jewish colleague from Nazi persecution were tepid, at best. Though dependent on physicist Meitner to interpret results of his experiments, Hahn nonetheless often took credit for joint research, and for the coup de grâce, Hahn accepted a Nobel Prize for seminal work in splitting the atom, stubbornly refusing to acknowledge that the breakthrough was made by Meitner. Moss rightly notes that misogyny in academia was systemic, and Hahn's behavior was on par with prevailing insensitivity. She also discusses how Meitner's own blindness to the peril closing in on her in Hitler's Germany delayed her emigration until only heroic efforts of others could save her. A brief comic book style episode introduces each chapter making an effective attention-grabber and a boon to report writers; a timeline, glossary of physics terms, scientist biographies, notes, bibliography, and index are included. Copyright © 2022 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois