Which lady physicist was part of the team that discovered nuclear fission for which her colleague Otto Hahn won the Nobel and is often mentioned as the most glaring example of womens scientific achievement overlooked by the Nobel committee?
Nobel Prize Black's key role. Political subterfuge may also deny proper recognition. Lise Meitner and Fritz Strassmann, who co-discovered nuclear fission along with Otto Hahn, may have been denied a share of Hahn's 1944 Nobel Chemistry Award due to having fled Germany when the Nazis came to power. The Meitner and Strassmann roles in the research was not fully recognised until years later, when they joined Hahn in receiving the 1966 Enrico Fermi Award. Alfred Nobel left his fortune to finance annual prizes to be awarded "to those who, during the preceding year, shall have conferred the greatest benefit on mankind". He
Nuclear fission neutrons was the product of nuclear fission, Hahn was awarded the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1944 (the sole recipient) "for his discovery of the fission of heavy nuclei". (The award was actually given to Hahn in 1945, as "the Nobel Committee for Chemistry decided that none of the year's nominations met the criteria as outlined in the will of Alfred Nobel." In such cases, the Nobel Foundation's statutes permit that year's prize be reserved until the following year.) News spread quickly of the new discovery, which was correctly seen as an entirely novel physical effect with great scientific—and potentially