A story that deserves to be told of four scientific women whose names you need to know but not

You may have heard of Lise Meitner. Originally from Austria, she was the first woman to become a full professor of physics in Germany. She also helped discover nuclear fission. However, the 1944 Nobel Prize in chemistry for this achievement only went to his longtime collaborator, Otto Hahn.

Meitner fought against misogyny and sexism at each stage of his illustrious career. But growing anti -Semitism and the Nazi takeover of Germany in 1933 was an even higher problem. Although she was converted into Lutheranism, her Jewish heritage endangered her. With the help of friends, she was able to flee in 1938 for neutral in Sweden, where she was safe but scientifically isolated. “I can never discuss my experiences with anyone who understands them,” she wrote to her colleague physicist Hedwig Kohn.

In “Sisters in Science”, Olivia Campbell recounts the intertwined stories of Meitner and three other notable, but less known physicians, of Germany: Kohn, Hertha Sponer and Hildegard Stücklen. Only Kohn was Jewish, but the hostility of the third Reich to academics also cost the other two jobs.

All three finally reached the United States, where it continued their career and continued to support each other (and also). Kohn, the last to escape, did not leave Europe in 1940. She endured two months of arduous travel through the Soviet Union and Japan and through the Pacific Ocean, barely surviving the test.

Theirs is an inspiring story and which is worth telling – all the more because, as Campbell notes in its dedication, so many other academics have been murdered by the Nazis. “Their absence haunts this book; The undulating impact of their loss affects us all, ”she writes.

But despite his intrinsic interest, “Sisters in Science” is a sometimes frustrating reading. Part of the problem is its ambitious scope. Group biography is a delicate genre. Campbell must merge four narrative arcs: sometimes parallels, overlapping the others, but also divergent. A more elegant stylist, or a real follower of narrative non-fiction, could have succeeded in integrating these stories in a more transparent way. This does not help that Campbell refers to his protagonists by their first names – and three of the four begin with the letter “H.”

Explaining physics to a secular audience is another challenge, perhaps unbearable. Campbell only tries it nominally. The idea of ​​fission, the fractionation of atomic nuclei and the production resulting from large amounts of energy, is more or less intelligible. But the achievements of the other three physicists, who worked in spectroscopy, optics and astrophysics, are more difficult to grasp.

The book would also have benefited from a better modification of copying and verification of the facts. Whatever his good faith as a scientific journalist, Campbell is not at home in the history of the Holocaust. An example: Campbell locates Dachau, the first Nazis concentration camp in Oranienburg, a suburb of Berlin. Dachau opened in 1933 in the city of Dachau, near Munich. Oranienburg was in fact the site of another eponymous camp, then, in 1936, Sachsenhausen.

There are other errors and lowerities. Campbell is continuously referring to Kristallnacht, the Nazi pogrom in November 1938, such as “Le Kristallnacht”. A more serious spear is his anachronistic suggestion that, in 1938, Meitner feared being expelled to a “death camp”. Camps such as Dachau and Sachsenhausen were brutal places, often deadly, but in the 1930s, they mainly housed Nazi political opponents (some of them Jewish). The Jews were not yet expelled from Germany, and the six death camps dedicated to their extermination – places such as Sobibor, Treblinka and Auschwitz -Birkenau, all in Poland – have not become operational Until the early 1940s.

He is also somewhat rude, and undoubtedly inaccurate, to say that Kristallnacht “explained the real program of the Nazis for the Jewish people: they wanted all to be dead”. Despite the growing virulence of anti-Jewish persecution, this objective was not yet clear and not yet an official policy. In fact, although some were killed, most of the 30,000 Jewish men gathered and taken to concentration camps during Kristallnacht were released provided they emigrate.

Presumably, Campbell is on a firmer area elsewhere – noting, for example, the difficulties to which scientific women have encountered in Germany, including fighting for remuneration, laboratory space and recognition; And by emphasizing the ways they and some sympathetic male colleagues, helped to endure, flourish and finally escape.

When she became a Hahn assistant in Berlin, for example, Meitner was exiled from the main laboratory and stuck in a basement workshop without a toilet nearby. She finally went up to direct the department of physics of Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Chemistry in Berlin, a position which she kept even after her dismissal from the Nazi era of the University of Berlin.

Some male scientists died against women. Others, like Max Planck, welcomed the collaboration that the most exceptional of their female peers. A heroic supporter of Women in Science was the winner of the Nobel Prize James Franck. German Jew, he resigned from his post at the University of Göttingen before he could be dismissed, immigrated to the United States via Denmark, and then helped to help his colleagues, including women, who remained behind.

Franck and Sponer, his survival assistant, were particularly close – friends and scientific collaborators. After a visit to the University of Oslo, Sponer accepted a position at Duke de Caroline University in North in 1936, and began working with Edward Teller, the possible creator of the hydrogen bomb, “on the vibrational excitement of polyatomical molecules by electronic collisions”.

It was only after Franck's wife died in 1942 that her permanent romance with sponger concluded. He stayed at the University of Chicago and she in Duke. But in 1946, they got married and, in the sympathetic account of Campbell, knew the real happiness in the middle of the sorrows around them.

Julia M. Klein is a cultural and critical journalist in Philadelphia.