On June 26, 1945, Lise Meitner arrived in the United States for the first time, invited to work on the Manhattan Project. She refused.

Meitner had co-discovered nuclear fission in 1938, working in collaboration with Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassmann in Berlin. She and her nephew Otto Frisch had provided the theoretical explanation: the uranium nucleus, bombarded with neutrons, was splitting. The energy released matched Einstein's equation.

She had fled Nazi Germany in 1938 — she was Jewish, and the laws stripping Jewish academics of their positions had finally reached her, despite her Austrian citizenship. She reached Stockholm with ten marks.

Hahn published the fission discovery in January 1939. He described it as a chemical discovery. Meitner's name was not on the paper.

The Nobel committee debated for years. In 1944, they awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry to Hahn alone, explicitly for the fission discovery. Meitner was nominated 48 times for the Nobel and never received one.

She declined to work on the Manhattan Project on moral grounds. She watched the bomb be used and said publicly that she was glad she had refused.

Element 109 is named Meitnerium in her honor. The Nobel was never corrected.