Meitner was born in Vienna on November 7, 1878, the third of eight children. She attended the University of Vienna, where she received a doctorate in physics in 1906. She was attracted to the University of Berlin by the work of Max Planck. At Berlin, she encountered blatant sexism that was not unusual in science at the time. It is reported that she was allowed to work with the great chemist, Emil Fischer, only with the understanding that she never enter a laboratory where men were working. At Berlin, she also met Otto Hahn, with whom she collaborated for thirty years.

Meitner devoted her life to the study of nuclear phenomena. In one of their first joint publications, for example, Meitner and Hahn described the recoil of atoms as a result of alpha particle emission. Their analysis provided a method for producing very pure samples of radioactive materials that eventually became...