Lise Meitner was nominated for a Nobel Prize 49 times and never won. The Nobel Prize nomination archive lists her as the nominee in 19 nominations for the Nobel Prize in Chemistry, from 1924 to 1948, and 30 for the Nobel Prize in Physics, from 1937 to 1967. Some accounts give 48; the archive’s own count is 49. She was one of the two physicists who first explained nuclear fission, yet the Nobel Prize for its discovery went to her long-time collaborator, the chemist Otto Hahn, alone.
The nominators
A nomination is a letter from a qualified scientist putting a name forward, and the archive keeps them. Meitner’s list reads like a roll call of twentieth-century physics. Max Planck nominated her seven times, six for chemistry and once for physics. Niels Bohr nominated her, and so did James Franck, Arthur Compton and Max Born. In 1948 one physics nomination came from Otto Hahn himself.
Fission
Meitner, born in Vienna in 1878, worked for many years in Berlin alongside Hahn. As a Jewish scientist under the Nazi regime she lost her position, and on 13–14 July 1938 she fled Germany for the Netherlands, later settling in Stockholm.
In 1938 Hahn and Fritz Strassmann bombarded uranium with neutrons and found that barium formed. In late December 1938 Meitner and her nephew, the physicist Otto Robert Frisch, worked out what had happened: the uranium nucleus had split in two. Their report in Nature in February 1939 gave the process its name, fission.
One name on the prize
The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 1944 was awarded to Otto Hahn alone, “for his discovery of the fission of heavy nuclei”. Because of the war, he received it one year later, in 1945. Meitner’s 49 nominations ran on for more than two decades more and none of them was successful.
When the committee files were opened, historians looked at what had gone wrong. In a 1997 article in Physics Today, Elisabeth Crawford, Ruth Lewin Sime and Mark Walker concluded that her exclusion from the chemistry award could be summarised as “a mixture of disciplinary bias, political obtuseness, ignorance, and haste”. They also argued that the structure of the Nobel committees was ill-suited to judging interdisciplinary work like hers, which sat between physics and chemistry, and that during the war the Swedish scientists relied on their own limited expertise.
A name that lasted
Meitner died in 1968. Recognition came in other forms, and one of them is permanent: in 1997 element 109 was named after her. The Short counts the 49 marks on a tally board and ends on that tile.
Forty-nine nominations, no prize, and one element. And that’s how we found out.
