In a 1959 lecture at Bryn Mawr College in Pennsylvania, Lise Meitner reflected that "Life need not be easy, provided that it is not empty." Life was not easy for any Jewish woman scientist in Germany in the first half of the twentieth century, and Meitner certainly had her own experience in mind when she made this statement.

Lise Meitner grew up in the Vienna of Emperor Franz-Josef and horsedrawn trolley cars. She was born there in 1878 into a well-to-do Jewish family and decided at an early age that she wanted to be a scientist like Madame Curie. (Later Albert Einstein would call her "the German Madame Curie.") In 1901, she entered the University of Vienna. There, where serious women students were considered odd, she was treated rudely by many of her fellow students. In 1905 she was only the second woman in the university's history to...