Speaker 1: Pushkin. Can anyone or anything be truly altruistic? Can incredible
Speaker 1: acts of kindness cause more harm than good? And what's
Speaker 1: the most effective way of doing good? I'm sure that
Speaker 1: the best selling author Michael Lewis will have some interesting
Speaker 1: thoughts because the world's most notorious effective altruist, Sam Banguin Freed,
Speaker 1: is the subject of Michael's book Going Infinite. I'm going
Speaker 1: to be talking to Michael about that relationship and his
Speaker 1: latest book, Who Is Government. But I want your help
Speaker 1: to explore the theme of altruism with Michael Lewis, So
Speaker 1: please send all of your kindness related questions from Michael
Speaker 1: Lewis to Tales at Pushkin dot fm. This episode is
Speaker 1: based on the book The Woman Who's the Atom by
Speaker 1: Marissa Moss. July thirteenth, nineteen thirty eight, Berlin, Lisamightner is terrified.
Speaker 1: She's being driven to the railway station to get on
Speaker 1: a slow stopping train to Neuveshance, a small town across
Speaker 1: the border in the Netherlands. It's a desperate final throw
Speaker 1: of the dice. Lisamightner is a scientist, and new restrictions
Speaker 1: under the Nazi government forbid scientists from emigrating, so she
Speaker 1: can't leave. But Lisamightner is also Jewish, meaning that she
Speaker 1: has no rights at all if she stays. Against all
Speaker 1: the odds, Miightner has carved out a career as a
Speaker 1: respected physicist. It was hard, very hard, and she doesn't
Speaker 1: want to give it up. A Jewish colleague, Albert Einstein,
Speaker 1: was visiting the United States when Hitler came to power.
Speaker 1: Now he has a job at Princeton. Other Jewish scientists,
Speaker 1: less famous than Einstein have also left. Sometimes they found
Speaker 1: good positions, sometimes they had to take whatever they could,
Speaker 1: but they left. As a woman in a man's world,
Speaker 1: Lisa Miitner didn't think she had any chance of getting
Speaker 1: a job to match what she'd achieved in Berlin. A professorship,
Speaker 1: a salary, a pension, and far more important than any
Speaker 1: of that, a modern laboratory in which to do physics.
Speaker 1: Nothing else really mattered, And so alone she had stayed
Speaker 1: while things got worse and worse and worse. Her friends
Speaker 1: have been worried about her. They've been begging her to
Speaker 1: get out before it's too late. Reluctantly, Miightner has agreed.
Speaker 1: She's decided to make a break for the border. But
Speaker 1: maybe it is too late. The man driving her is
Speaker 1: her friend, Paul Rossbard. He's a science editor. As they
Speaker 1: approach the railway station, she starts to panic. The plan
Speaker 1: is absurd. She's small and dark haired. She doesn't look arian.
Speaker 1: She has no passport. The station and the train will
Speaker 1: be crawling with guards. She begs Rossbard to turn back.
Speaker 1: Rossbard keeps going. What Miightner doesn't realize is that he
Speaker 1: leads a double life. He's a spy working with British intelligence.
Speaker 1: He's not going to let one of the world's most
Speaker 1: brilliant atomic physicists stay in Germany any longer, so he
Speaker 1: soothes her. She's going to be fine. Nobody's going to
Speaker 1: suspect anything. She has a small suitcase, it doesn't look
Speaker 1: like she's taking a long trip, and she'll have company,
Speaker 1: a Dutch physicist called Dirk Costa. He'll look after her.
Speaker 1: She has more friends rooting for her than she realizes.
Speaker 1: The station is framed by swastikas and packed with police patrols.
Speaker 1: Costa is smiling, friendly waiting on the train. Everything's going
Speaker 1: to be fine, he explains. As the little train chugs
Speaker 1: past village after village, each one plastered with Nazi symbols.
Speaker 1: The Dutch border officials are expecting us. Everything's arranged, and
Speaker 1: if the ESSs stop us, she wonders. She knows many
Speaker 1: people who've been arrested on trains and dragged back to Berlin.
Speaker 1: Costa is nervous himself, but he pretends to be relaxed.
Speaker 1: Why would the ESSs bother with them? And then at
Speaker 1: the border the train stops. German border guards and ss
Speaker 1: officers enter the compartment where Costa and Lisa Miightner are sitting.
Speaker 1: She shrinks in her seat, acutely aware that she's Jewish.
Speaker 1: She's expressly forbidden to leave the country, and she has
Speaker 1: no passport. The SSS officer stands in front of them
Speaker 1: and holds out his hand expectantly papers I'm Tim Harford
Speaker 1: and you're listening to cautionary tales. Born in Vienna in
Speaker 1: eighteen seventy eight, Lisa Mightner was an ordinary girl, or
Speaker 1: so she felt. She just happened to be an ordinary
Speaker 1: girl who slept with a math textbook under her pillow.
Speaker 1: Marissa Moss's biography of Miightner describes a girl who was
Speaker 1: full of questions. Why did oil on a puddle? Produce
Speaker 1: that strange rainbow reflection. How could numbers describe curves carefully
Speaker 1: drawn on a grid? She dreamed of university, just a
Speaker 1: dream since she hadn't even been able to go to
Speaker 1: high school and Austrian universities didn't admit women. Fortunately, the
Speaker 1: law in Austria changed just in time for Lisa to
Speaker 1: fulfill her dream. She sat the ferociously difficult high school
Speaker 1: exit exam, test skills taught in classes she had never
Speaker 1: been able to take. She passed, and in nineteen oh
Speaker 1: one became the first woman at the University of Vienna
Speaker 1: to study physics. It wasn't easy, small, cringingly shy, and
Speaker 1: obviously resented by many of the professors, She nevertheless persevered
Speaker 1: if she could do physics, all the everyday indignities were bearable.
Speaker 1: In nineteen oh six, she earned a PhD in physics.
Speaker 1: Nobody would offer an academic job to a woman, so
Speaker 1: she built her own equipment at home and began studying radiation.
Speaker 1: In nineteen oh seven, she published her first scientific paper,
Speaker 1: and she decided that if her research was to advance,
Speaker 1: she would need to move to Berlin, the world center
Speaker 1: of physics at the time. That wasn't easy either. Again,
Speaker 1: there were no job offers. The University of Berlin was
Speaker 1: an entirely male environment, and Encyclopedia commissioned her to write
Speaker 1: a piece about radioactivity before rescinding the offer when they
Speaker 1: realized that this scholarly seeming el Miightner was nothing more
Speaker 1: than a woman. But she made it work. She was
Speaker 1: offered some space in the basement of Berlin's Experimental Physics Institute,
Speaker 1: no salary, no toilets, should have to leave via the
Speaker 1: side door and go to a hotel or restaurant down
Speaker 1: the street, no access to the men's laboratories, but something
Speaker 1: she scraped by on a small allowance from her father
Speaker 1: and earning money for translating scientific articles. Then Lisa Meitner
Speaker 1: met Otto Hahn and things started to change. Otto Hahn
Speaker 1: wasn't a physicist like Miightner. He was a chemist, but
Speaker 1: the new science of radiation was a place where physics
Speaker 1: and chemistry met and worked in partnership. Hahn was easygoing
Speaker 1: and sociable. Miightner was neither, but he was also ambitious
Speaker 1: and meticulous, and he knew a good physicist when he
Speaker 1: met one. Lisa Miightner was a good physicist, and the
Speaker 1: fact that she was a woman didn't bother Otto Hahn.
Speaker 1: Hahn and Mightner would work together as research partners for decades.
Speaker 1: It was a close relationship, but also an unusual one.
Speaker 1: Lisa Mightner was very reserved, very shy, Otto Hahn later recalled,
Speaker 1: for many years, I never had a meal with her
Speaker 1: except on a official occasions, nor did we ever go
Speaker 1: for a walk together, and yet we were really very
Speaker 1: close friends. Otto was perhaps Miightner's closest friend of all.
Speaker 1: She didn't love small talk, but she felt comfortable with Otto,
Speaker 1: and of course when she wanted to talk about science,
Speaker 1: which was often, Hahn was perfect. I love physics with
Speaker 1: all my heart, she once wrote. It's a kind of
Speaker 1: personal love, as one had for a person to whom
Speaker 1: one is grateful for many things. Hahn was an expert chemist,
Speaker 1: but he needed Miightner to interpret the results of his
Speaker 1: experiments to understand what they were revealing about the nature
Speaker 1: of the atom and the particles that made it up.
Speaker 1: Over the first six years of their research partnership, Hahn
Speaker 1: and Miightner published more than twenty scientific papers. He ran
Speaker 1: the experiments, she interpreted the physics underpinning the results and
Speaker 1: wrote them up. When a new research center, the Kaiser
Speaker 1: Wilhelm Institute, was established, both Hahn and Miightner were given
Speaker 1: modern laboratories on the basis of their work together. The
Speaker 1: rest of the scientific world was beginning to admire the
Speaker 1: work of el Meightner. The most assumed, of course, that
Speaker 1: l Meitner was a man. But in Berlin, her colleagues
Speaker 1: at the KWI, including Albert Einstein himself, were starting to
Speaker 1: treat her neither as a man nor as a woman.
Speaker 1: But how she wanted to be treated as a scientist.
Speaker 1: And then came nineteen fourteen and the war. Lisa volunteered
Speaker 1: as an X ray specialist on the Eastern Front, using
Speaker 1: scientific discoveries to help people heal. Otto Hahn went to
Speaker 1: work with the great chemist Fritz Harbor making chemical weapons.
Speaker 1: In nineteen eighteen, Fritz Harbor was wanted by the Allies
Speaker 1: for war crimes and was also awarded the Nobel Prize
Speaker 1: for chemistry. Such were the contradictions of modern science. After
Speaker 1: the war, at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute, Meitner conducted and
Speaker 1: analyzed experiments that revealed a new element, protactinium. She'd discussed
Speaker 1: her work intensively with Hahn and so put his name
Speaker 1: alongside hers on the scientific paper she wrote. Hahn was
Speaker 1: promptly awarded the prestigious Emil Fisher Medal for the discovery
Speaker 1: of Protactinium Meiitner's contribute was acknowledged with the replica of
Speaker 1: Hahn's medal. But despite the ongoing misogyny and the difficulties
Speaker 1: of life in Germany after the First World War, Lisamightner
Speaker 1: was flourishing. She built the first cloud chamber in Germany,
Speaker 1: a vital piece of scientific equipment for investigating tiny particles.
Speaker 1: She published a string of papers without Hahn's involvement, and
Speaker 1: finally she was given a full professorship, the first woman
Speaker 1: in Germany ever to hold the position. Hahn was making
Speaker 1: three times more money than her, but progress was progress.
Speaker 1: Lisa Miightner and Otto Hahn were nominated for the Nobel
Speaker 1: Prize in Chemistry in nineteen twenty four, nineteen twenty five,
Speaker 1: nineteen twenty nine and nineteen thirty three. Surely the prize
Speaker 1: was just a matter of time, but something else happened.
Speaker 1: In nineteen thirty three, Adolf Hitler became the Chancellor of Germany.
Speaker 1: Cautionary tales will be back after the break. Fritz Harbour's
Speaker 1: fate should have been a warning. In nineteen thirty three,
Speaker 1: he was the head of their institute, the KWI. Harbor
Speaker 1: was a scientific hero, the creator of the chemical process
Speaker 1: that even today gives the world access to fertilizer, one
Speaker 1: of the single greatest contributions any scientist has made to
Speaker 1: human well being. He was also a war hero in
Speaker 1: Germany thanks to his work on chemical weapons, and he
Speaker 1: was also a Jew. Harbor was ordered to fire every
Speaker 1: Jewish scientist in the KWI. He refused and resigned. Good riddance,
Speaker 1: said the Nazi Minister for Education. He might have been
Speaker 1: a competent scientist, but he had stocked the KWI with
Speaker 1: Jewish scientists. Harbor's successor as the head of the KWI
Speaker 1: was Max Planck. Plank was influential enough to arrange a
Speaker 1: meeting with Adolph Hitler himself. Surely, said Plank, it wasn't
Speaker 1: necessary to purge patriots such as Harbor. He was deeply German.
Speaker 1: Hitler flew into a rage. There are no good Jews,
Speaker 1: he shouted, there is no Jewish worthiness. As Plank tried
Speaker 1: to apologize, Hitler became even more agitated, Plank made a
Speaker 1: hasty exit. Harber died of a heart attack shortly afterwards,
Speaker 1: and his former colleagues at the KWI waited in vain
Speaker 1: for the official commemoration of this great scientific hero. Nothing.
Speaker 1: Plank decided that the KWI would hold a memorial. The
Speaker 1: authorities promptly announced that university faculty were forbidden to take
Speaker 1: part in the memorial ceremony for the Jew Fritz Harbor.
Speaker 1: Max Planck insisted that the ceremony should go ahead. When Planck, Miitner,
Speaker 1: and Hahn arrived at the venue, there were plenty of
Speaker 1: Nazi soldiers observing the proceedings, but the hall was packed.
Speaker 1: Most professors had bowed to the pressure and stayed away,
Speaker 1: but they'd sent their wives as representatives. It was a
Speaker 1: touching moment, but it was also ominous. If Fritz Harbor
Speaker 1: couldn't be protected, nobody could. And the presence of all
Speaker 1: those scientists' wives showed that while many people had sympathy
Speaker 1: for the way Jews were being treated, there was a
Speaker 1: limit to how much defiance they were really willing to
Speaker 1: show when the Nazis came to power. Jews were one
Speaker 1: percent of the German population, but twenty percent of scientists
Speaker 1: were Jewish. You might think that this would make them
Speaker 1: a national asset, but not a bit of it. The
Speaker 1: Nazi complained was that the Jews had taken over and
Speaker 1: filled the universities with their unscientific Jewish dogmas, and some
Speaker 1: leading German scientists were happy enough to amplify this message.
Speaker 1: The most prominent example of the damaging influence of the
Speaker 1: Jews on science, wrote one Nobel laureate physicist, is provided
Speaker 1: by mister Einstein with his theories. Every Jewish scientist who
Speaker 1: could left, from mister Einstein himself, all the way down
Speaker 1: the academic pecking order, everyone left except Lisamightner. What she'd
Speaker 1: built up at the KWI was so essential to her
Speaker 1: she couldn't bear to leave it. There were only so
Speaker 1: many jobs that universities outside Germany could find for these
Speaker 1: refugee scientists, and a woman such as Miightner would never
Speaker 1: be a priority. If she didn't have a lab, if
Speaker 1: she couldn't practice physics, what was the point of leaving
Speaker 1: before long? Lisamightner was the last Jewish scientist in Berlin.
Speaker 1: If she'd hoped that her colleagues would protect her, she'd
Speaker 1: be disappointed. Max Plank tried, but hadn't been able to
Speaker 1: protect Fritz Harbor. He certainly couldn't protect her. Miightner was
Speaker 1: banned from teaching and stripped of her title and salary,
Speaker 1: but she still had her lab. Even so, colleagues started
Speaker 1: to worry that having a duess in the institute was
Speaker 1: a bad look. When Miightner asked Otto Hahn to speak
Speaker 1: up on her behalf, he refused. He had his own concerns.
Speaker 1: He later recalled that the presence of l Mightner did
Speaker 1: not make the situation better. Thus, at the yearly meetings
Speaker 1: of the KWI, I was already seated in a less
Speaker 1: prestigious place at the dinner table than was appropriate for
Speaker 1: my position. These were, he said, painful experiences. Hahn and
Speaker 1: Mightner had worked closely together for a quarter of a century,
Speaker 1: but now that no longer suited him, He ended his
Speaker 1: research partnership with Lisa Miightner. Officially, that is, unofficially, he
Speaker 1: was always coming to her for help in understanding the
Speaker 1: physics behind his chemistry experiments. Not every scientist was so complicit.
Speaker 1: Hahn's new young assistant, Fritz Strassmann, had already been sacked
Speaker 1: for protesting the Nazi takeover of the German Chemical Association.
Speaker 1: When Hahn hired him, Strassman again refused to join the
Speaker 1: Nazi party and lost three quarters of his salary as
Speaker 1: a result. It was Miitner who urged Hahn to divert
Speaker 1: research funds to help Strassman support his young family. Indeed,
Speaker 1: Strassman was braver than she knew. For a time, his
Speaker 1: little apartment concealed a Jewish woman on the run from
Speaker 1: the Gestapo. Most of Meitner's colleagues didn't have anything like
Speaker 1: that kind of courage. One Jewish physicist, Leo Zillard recalled
Speaker 1: how the complicity played out. They ask, well, supposing I
Speaker 1: would oppose this, thinking what good would I do? I
Speaker 1: would just lose my influence, Then why should I oppose it?
Speaker 1: But otto Hahn didn't just fail to oppose the Nazi rules.
Speaker 1: He was anxious to comply. Behind Lisa Miightner's back, he
Speaker 1: lobbed to have her dismissed so as to end the
Speaker 1: institute's distracting Jewish problem. So much for we were really
Speaker 1: very close friends. Having lost her salary and her title,
Speaker 1: she next lost her academic apartment. She moved into a hotel,
Speaker 1: living off her savings and continuing to go into the lab.
Speaker 1: But by nineteen thirty eight it was obvious to Lisa
Speaker 1: Mightner's friends that she was in terrible danger. The kW
Speaker 1: I tried to arrange a passport for her, without success.
Speaker 1: The authorities refused to let her go, explaining that it
Speaker 1: was undesirable to let renowned Jews leave Germany for abroad
Speaker 1: to act there against the interests of Germany. An international
Speaker 1: network of scientists desperately searched for a way to get
Speaker 1: Lisa out of Germany, and with equal desperation, tried to
Speaker 1: persuade her to go. The decisive moment when she tried
Speaker 1: to visit her own laboratory and her old friend and colleague,
Speaker 1: Otto Hahn confronted her and insisted that she leave. He has,
Speaker 1: in essence thrown me out, she wrote in her diary,
Speaker 1: and she sadly agreed to the plan to smuggle her
Speaker 1: out of Germany. Otto Hahn did find a bit of
Speaker 1: courage in the end. He invited Lisa to stay at
Speaker 1: his house the night before she left, helping with her
Speaker 1: cover story. As they said their goodbyes and agreed to
Speaker 1: work together by writing letters, Otto pressed his mother's diamond
Speaker 1: ring into Lisa's hand. Maybe it would be useful in
Speaker 1: an emergency, he stiffly explained, she could sell it or something.
Speaker 1: Lisa was touched and then into the car with Paul
Speaker 1: Rossbard and to the station. Might Know in a panic,
Speaker 1: and Rossbard trying to soothe her and sitting next to
Speaker 1: Dirk Costa on the seven hour train journey to the
Speaker 1: Netherlands as he smoothly reassured her that nobody was going
Speaker 1: to ask for her papers until the train stopped at
Speaker 1: the border crossing, and standing there in front of them
Speaker 1: was the SS officer and outstretched demanding to see a passport.
Speaker 1: Lisa Mightner clutched the ring tightly, as though somehow it
Speaker 1: might save her. She knew it couldn't. Derk Costa, seeming calm,
Speaker 1: reached into his suit pocket and pulled out his passport.
Speaker 1: The SS guard inspected it, nodded, then walked on down
Speaker 1: the train corridor. The husband's papers were in order, Why
Speaker 1: bother to check the wife's. For decades, over and over again,
Speaker 1: Lisa Mightner had been ignored with the attention being given
Speaker 1: to whichever man happened to be in the vicinity. It
Speaker 1: had happened again, and this time it had saved her life. Caution,
Speaker 1: retales will be back. After the break, the trains started
Speaker 1: moving again, crossing the border into the Netherlands. No more
Speaker 1: swastikas or soldiers. They were free. Over the days that followed,
Speaker 1: words spread among her friends and the scientific community more widely,
Speaker 1: Lisa Miightner was safe. One scientist sent a telegram to
Speaker 1: Dirk Costa, you have made yourself as famous for the
Speaker 1: production of Lisamightner as for discovering hafnium. Back in Berlin,
Speaker 1: Hahn and his Nazi DeFi buying assistant Strassmann were puzzled.
Speaker 1: In Berlin, they were continuing work that Hahn had been
Speaker 1: doing with Miightner, firing neutrons at uranium, the heaviest known
Speaker 1: naturally occurring element. They hoped to create a new element
Speaker 1: like protactinium, which Miightner had discovered years earlier. But instead
Speaker 1: of discovering new heavy elements as a result of the experiment,
Speaker 1: Hahn was finding something that behaved like barium, a much
Speaker 1: lighter element that just seemed impossible. It was as though
Speaker 1: Newton's apple didn't fall from the tree but floated off
Speaker 1: into space. Was Hahn just making a mistake doing sloppy chemistry.
Speaker 1: He wrote to his old collaborator, Lisa Miightner to ask
Speaker 1: for her help. Miightner was safely in Stockholm, where she'd
Speaker 1: secured a position as a dune. You're a searcher. All
Speaker 1: her old equipment, the best neutron sources, the best detectors,
Speaker 1: was all sitting untouched in her lab since the day
Speaker 1: she had fled Berlin. But even if she couldn't get
Speaker 1: to it, she could at least explain to Hahn how
Speaker 1: to use it with her guidance. He tried again, but
Speaker 1: he was still baffled, and Miightner was puzzled too. While
Speaker 1: Hahn was writing up his results for publication, including an
Speaker 1: admission that frankly, he didn't understand what was going on,
Speaker 1: Lisa Miightner went for a long walk with her nephew,
Speaker 1: another physicist. It was Christmas eve and they were staying
Speaker 1: in the Swedish countryside for a few days. Lisa walked
Speaker 1: and talked her nephew, skiing alongside as they bounced around
Speaker 1: the problem. Maybe Hahn was just making a mistake the
Speaker 1: setup of his experiment, he suggested, No, she replied, he
Speaker 1: had the best equipment my equipment, and Otto Hahn does
Speaker 1: not make mistakes, not in the laboratory anyway. And then
Speaker 1: suddenly it came to her. She sat down on a
Speaker 1: snow covered log, pulled out a notebook, and started to
Speaker 1: run through some calculations. What if Hahn really had created barium.
Speaker 1: Barium was about half the atomic weight of uranium, it
Speaker 1: would mean the atom had just split in two. Everyone
Speaker 1: assumed that couldn't happen. In his book E Equals MC Squared,
Speaker 1: David Badanis describes it as like throwing a pebble at
Speaker 1: a boulder, only for the boulder to crack in half.
Speaker 1: But Mitna realized that the urineum nucleus wasn't like a boulder.
Speaker 1: There were powerful forces holding it together, but there were
Speaker 1: also powerful forces inside it trying to push it apart.
Speaker 1: When she did the calculations, she understood a stream of
Speaker 1: neutrons could start to wobble it, and once it was wobbling,
Speaker 1: a single neutron that hit at the right moment would
Speaker 1: split the atom, but split it into what Ottohhn had
Speaker 1: found barium. Mitna realized that if the uranium atom was
Speaker 1: literally splitting in two, and one part was barium, the
Speaker 1: other part would be krypton. The total number of protons
Speaker 1: in a barium atom and a krypton atom are the
Speaker 1: same as the protons in an uranium atom, so that
Speaker 1: added up, and krypton was an invisible gas. You couldn't
Speaker 1: see it, you couldn't smell it, and so of course
Speaker 1: Hahn hadn't realized it was even there. Miightner realized two
Speaker 1: more things linked together. First, barium and krypton together have
Speaker 1: the same number of protons as uranium, but their total
Speaker 1: mass is less. Where had the extra mass gone? Second,
Speaker 1: once the uranium had split into barium and krypton, those
Speaker 1: two new atoms would fly apart, repulsed by powerful forces.
Speaker 1: Where did the energy for that come from? Mass had
Speaker 1: mysteriously disappeared. Energy had mysteriously appeared. But her old colleague
Speaker 1: Einstein had a formula for that E equals mc squared.
Speaker 1: A little bit of mass could turn into a vast
Speaker 1: release of energy. Miightner realized that otto Hahn had split
Speaker 1: the atom and unlocked atomic energy without realizing what he
Speaker 1: had done. Einstein later wrote, I believed only that it
Speaker 1: was theoretically possible. It was discovered by Hahn in Berlin
Speaker 1: and he himself misinterpreted what he discovered. It was Lisa
Speaker 1: Meiitner who provided the correct interpretation. It was the biggest
Speaker 1: discovery in physics since Einstein's theory of relativity. But while
Speaker 1: scientists initially gave the credit to Miiitner and her nephew,
Speaker 1: journalists increasingly tended to mention Hahn. She wrote to Hahn
Speaker 1: begging him to be honest about the credit. I don't
Speaker 1: feel at all happy, she wrote, adding that her new
Speaker 1: colleagues in Stockholm will soon believe, especially after your excellent results,
Speaker 1: that I didn't do anything, and that you both did
Speaker 1: all the physics too. At Berlin, alongside the tussle for credit,
Speaker 1: a much bigger struggle was developing. Meiightner's analysis had been comprehensive,
Speaker 1: but there was one thing she had missed. When a
Speaker 1: neutron split an atom, other neutrons might be emitted. Over
Speaker 1: in the United States. Meiightner's old colleague Leo Zillard realized
Speaker 1: that those neutrons could go on to split more nearby atoms.
Speaker 1: The result would be a chain reaction and a colossal
Speaker 1: release of energy, a source of power perhaps or the
Speaker 1: deadliest weapon in history. Zillard alerted Einstein, Einstein alerted President Roosevelt. Secretly,
Speaker 1: work started on the atomic bomb. But would Lisa Maiitner
Speaker 1: join the effort. Absolutely Not like Einstein, and unlike almost
Speaker 1: all of her other peers, she refused to be complicit
Speaker 1: in creating such a deadly weapon. After Germany surrendered, Liza
Speaker 1: wrote to Otto about the behavior of the scientists who
Speaker 1: had stayed in Germany. All of you worked for Nazi
Speaker 1: Germany and never attempted passive resistance. Of course, to save
Speaker 1: your troubled consciences, you occasionally helped an oppressed person. Still,
Speaker 1: you let millions of innocent people be murdered, and there
Speaker 1: was never a sound of protest. She urged him and
Speaker 1: his colleagues to make a statement acknowledging their culpability. Hahn
Speaker 1: never did, and indeed received the letter. By then, he
Speaker 1: and other leading German scientists were being comfortably detained by
Speaker 1: the British. Both Liza and Otto were pondering life after
Speaker 1: the war, but the war wasn't over. The sudden chain
Speaker 1: reaction in an atomic explosion produces temperatures hotter than the
Speaker 1: center of the sun. One of those artificial suns appeared
Speaker 1: in the sky nineteen hundred feet above the city of Hiroshima.
Speaker 1: The full burning blast lasted about half a second, and
Speaker 1: as it started to fade, the incredible heat radiated out
Speaker 1: nineteen hundred feet below. Fires started, apparently for no reason.
Speaker 1: Skin was ripped off, hanging in sheets from people's flesh.
Speaker 1: A moment later, a shockwave incredible ferocity flattened Hiroshima. When
Speaker 1: the news reached Lisa Mightno in Stockholm, she was utterly appalled.
Speaker 1: Imagine her horror when the American press named her the
Speaker 1: mother of the atomic bomb. Otto Hahn received a different honor.
Speaker 1: The Swedish Academy awarded him the Nobel Prize for chemistry. Somehow,
Speaker 1: the shy little lady got the credit when it came
Speaker 1: to mass slaughter, but the charming gentleman was at the
Speaker 1: front of the queue when it was Nobel Prize time.
Speaker 1: In nineteen o three, the Swedish Academy had tried to
Speaker 1: award the Nobel Prize in Physics to honor re Becquerel
Speaker 1: and Pierre Curie, but someone tipped off Pierre and he
Speaker 1: complained that his wife Mary Curi was equally deserving. In
Speaker 1: the end, Mary got her share of the prize, but
Speaker 1: Mary Curie had a loyal husband to advocate for her.
Speaker 1: Lisa Miitner only had Otto Hahn. It was understandable that
Speaker 1: when Hahn was in Berlin working under the Nazi regime,
Speaker 1: he would hesitate to credit the dwess who had eluded
Speaker 1: the SS. After the war, some of his colleagues still
Speaker 1: pressed him to downplay Mitner's achievement. But Hahn had a
Speaker 1: Nobel prize. He could give credit to anyone he liked.
Speaker 1: He could play the role that Pierre Curie played for Marie.
Speaker 1: So when Hahn was giving his Nobel Prize acceptance speech
Speaker 1: in Stockholm, the adopted home of his colleague, mentor, and
Speaker 1: very close friend, Lisa Mightner, what did he say as
Speaker 1: she looked on from the audience. He thanked Lisamightner for
Speaker 1: the excellent work she had done as his assistant. Afterwards,
Speaker 1: Hahn complained that Miightner and her friends had been rather
Speaker 1: frosty towards him. He couldn't understand why. Maybe they were
Speaker 1: still bitter about Hitler, but some part of Hahn's conscience
Speaker 1: was bothering him because he quietly gave Lisa Mightner a
Speaker 1: large share of the Nobel prize money. Miightner gave it
Speaker 1: all to the Emergency Committee of Atomic Scientists, an organization
Speaker 1: helping to resettle Jewish scientist refugees. Hahn wanted to forget
Speaker 1: all about how the Jews had been treated. Miitna didn't.
Speaker 1: She never returned to her old job in Germany, and
Speaker 1: she never did get the pension they owed her. Neither
Speaker 1: did she ever receive the Nobel Prize, despite being nominated
Speaker 1: nineteen times for chemistry and twenty nine times for physics.
Speaker 1: She did receive many other awards. Most poignantly, she was
Speaker 1: the first recipient of the Otto Hahn Prize. Otto joked
Speaker 1: as he handed her the medal that bore his name
Speaker 1: that she could buy him a beer with the prize money.
Speaker 1: Liza didn't see the funny side. This episode of Cautionary
Speaker 1: Tales was based on the book The Woman Who Split
Speaker 1: the Atom by Marie Moss. For a full list of
Speaker 1: our sources, see the show notes at Timharford dot com.
Speaker 1: Cautionary Tales is written by me Tim Harford with Andrew Wright,
Speaker 1: Alice Fines, and Ryan Dilly. It's produced by Georgia Mills
Speaker 1: and Marilyn Rust. The sound design and original music are
Speaker 1: the work of Pascal Wise. Additional sound designs by Carlos
Speaker 1: San Juan at Brain Audio. Ben A Dafhaffrey edited the scripts.
Speaker 1: The show features the voice talents of Melanie Guttridge, Stella Harford,
Speaker 1: Oliver Hembrough, Sarah Jupp, Mas, Sam and Roe, Jamal Westman,
Speaker 1: and rufus Wright. The show also wouldn't have been possible
Speaker 1: without the work of Jacob Weisberg, Greta Cohne, Sarah Nix,
Speaker 1: Eric Sandler, Carrie Brody, Christina Sullivan, Kira Posey, and Owen Miller.
Speaker 1: Cautionary Tales is a production of Pushkin Industries. It's recorded
Speaker 1: at Wardore Studios in London. Like Tom Barrier, if you
Speaker 1: like the show, please remember to share, rate and review.
Speaker 1: It really makes a difference to us and if you
Speaker 1: want to hear the show, add free sign up to
Speaker 1: Pushkin Plus on the show page on Apple Podcasts or
Speaker 1: at pushkin dot Fm, slash plus