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I won't bother telling the story of all that happened next: the calculations and experiments confirming that uranium really was splitting into lighter nuclei, the development of the atomic bomb, which Meitner refused to participate in, how she was nonetheless hailed as the "Jewish mother of the bomb" when she came to America in 1946 - and how Hahn alone got the Nobel prize for fission, also in 1946.

It's particularly irksome how Hahn seemed to claim all the credit for himself in his later years. But history has dealt him a bit of poetic justice. Element 105 was tentatively called "hahnium" by a team of scientists at Berkeley who produced it, but later, the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry decreed that it be dubbed "dubnium" - after Dubna, where a Russian team also made this element.

To prevent confusion, no other element can now be called "hahnium". But element 109 is called "meitnerium".

For more, I highly recommend this biography:

• Ruth Sime, Lise Meitner: A Life in Physics, University of California Press, 1997.

(n/7, n = 7)