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67 | Late reaction

Illustration: Yves Haltner

Illustration: Yves Haltner

Late reaction. Chemist Otto Hahn and physicist Lise Meitner worked together in the building on Thiel Allee 63, doing research in radiochemistry. In 1944 Otto Hahn won a Nobel Prize for the discovery of uranium fission. The contributions made by Lise Meitner, who as a Jewish citizen, had to flee Germany during the Nazi period, went unrecognized. In 2010 Freie Universität renamed the Otto Hahn Building, today part of the Institute of Chemistry and Biochemistry, in recognition of Lise Meitner. It is now called the Hahn-Meitner Building.
 

 

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Lise Meitner was the only person Otto Hahn wrote to about the results of the radiochemical experiments in advance of publication. Lise Meitner and her nephew Otto Robert Frisch, in exile in Sweden at the time, were then able to publish a first theoretical physical explanation in the English journal Nature at the beginning of 1939. In the article they estimated the release of a very large amount of energy. Frisch coined the term “nuclear fission,” which in the following years was recognized internationally. In 1957 Freie Universität awarded the experimental physicist Lise Meitner an honorary doctorate in recognition of her work in the discovery of nuclear fission. She passed away in Cambridge in 1968.