Otto Hahn

Born 8 March 1879, Hahn earned his doctorate from the University of Marburg in 1901, then trained under William Ramsay in London and Ernest Rutherford in Montreal, discovering new radioactive isotopes. Back in Germany by 1906, he set up in a basement woodworking shop at the University of Berlin and began a decades-long collaboration with Austrian physicist Lise Meitner. Between 1934 and 1938, working with Fritz Strassmann, they bombarded uranium with neutrons - the experiments that revealed nuclear fission. Meitner, Jewish, fled Germany in 1938; Hahn stayed, catalogued fission products during the war for the German nuclear program, and in 1944 received the Nobel alone. After Allied detention at Farm Hall, he spent his final decades rebuilding German science: last president of the Kaiser Wilhelm Society, founding president of the Max Planck Society from 1948 to 1960, and co-founder of the Federation of German Scientists in 1959. He died 28 July 1968, one of post-war Germany's most respected voices for responsible science.