Otto Hahn (left) won a Nobel Prize for the discovery of nuclear fission and would later downplay his colleague Lise Meitner (right) for her critical role in the discovery.ullstein bild Dtl./Getty ...

When Lise Meitner was invited to Los Alamos in the early 1940s to work on the Manhattan Project, the code name for the secret program to develop the first nuclear weapons, she declined, saying, “I ...