Meitnerium: The element of forgotten women in science and technology

When I think about science and innovation, I always envisage a big jigsaw puzzle that is burgeoning thanks to all the people who are annexing pieces. The ultimate goal of pure science is to find answers so that we can fathom our life and universe. Nonetheless, an answer is inevitably preceded by a question. In my opinion, really important questions, therefore big contributions to the big puzzle, come from people that have passion for knowledge and a huge amount of curiosity. Every person can have these qualities. It doesn’t matter your gender, sexual orientation, race, religion, or nationality. Actually, diversity has been proved to play an important role in human progress.

Perception of gender asymmetry in science and technology

However, during my childhood, I always heard about famous male scientists and inventors: Archimedes of Syracuse, Thales of Miletus, Eratosthenes of Cyrene, Galileo Galilei, Blaise Pascal, Isaac Newton, Charles Darwin, Louis Pasteur, Lord Kelvin, Alfred Nobel, Thomas Edison, Albert Einstein, Enrico Fermi, Stephen Hawking. No female scientist? I was seeing this as an asymmetry and it was bothering me. Why was that? I assumed that there had to be equal opportunities for men and women. I wasn’t aware of the big discrimination that women face in science and in other fields.

Then, at the age of 10, I read about a female scientist for the first time. She was Marie Curie. Unfortunately, the book I was reading didn’t go into great detail but I spent days contemplating her discoveries about radioactivity. She was the first woman to win a Nobel prize and the first person to win two Nobel prizes, first in 1903 and again in 1911. Then, I found out about a famous Italian scientist, Rita Levi Montalcini. She received the Nobel prize in Medicine in 1986, jointly with Stanley Cohen, for the discovery of the nerve growth factor (NGF). A few years laters, while I was watching a quiz show on TV a question was asked: “Who invented the windscreen wiper?” It was a woman! Mary Elizabeth Anderson invented that in 1903. Her device was hand-operated. It consisted of a rubber blade which was manoeuvred using a lever inside the car. In 1917, another woman, Charlotte Bridgewood, patented the “electric storm windshield cleaner”.

Lise Meitner, the forgotten mother of nuclear energy

The world started to appear less asymmetric to me. Even without the internet, I realised a lot of women gave and are giving their contributions to scientific and technological progress. However, they are still facing a lot of barriers in scientific research and the importance of their work is not always fully recognized. History is full of examples where women didn’t get adequate recognition for their discoveries.

In 1938, Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassman bombarded uranium with neutrons and discovered nuclear fission. Otto Hahn won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1944 "for his discovery of the fission of heavy nuclei" and is widely considered the “father of nuclear fission”. Few people may know that the mathematical and physical explanation of nuclear fission was given by Lise Meitner and her nephew, Otto Frisch. Lise Meitner also gave some advice to Hahn on how to conduct the experiments. She was the first woman physics professor in Germany at the University of Berlin. Albert Einstein praised her as the “German Marie Curie”. She received 48 nominations for the Nobel prize but she was never awarded it. The element 109 in the periodic table was named “meitnerium” in her honour by their discoverers. This element was synthesised on August 29, 1982, at the GSI Helmholtz Centre for Heavy Ion Research in Darmstadt, by a team led by Peter Armbruster and Gottfried Münzenberg. Referring to Lise Meitner, the GSI team proposed the naming “to render justice to a victim of German racism and to credit in fairness a scientific life and work”. In fact, Lise Meitner was also a victim of German racism because she came from a Jewish family.

In present times, there are still a lot of gender inequities. According to the data from the UNESCO Institute for Statistics (UIS) (http://uis.unesco.org/en/topic/women-science), only 30% of the world’s researchers are women. As of today, only 58 women have been awarded a Nobel Prize. Still, a lot of work needs to be done in our society.