On November 7, 1878, Lise Meitner entered the world in Vienna, Austria. She was the third of eight children born to Jewish parents, and she began studying physics under Ludwig Boltzmann at the University of Vienna in 1901. After finishing her doctorate in 1906, she moved to Berlin the following year to work with chemist Otto Hahn and quantum physicist Max Planck. She shared a 30-year career with Hahn at Berlin's Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Chemistry, where they both served as section heads. Hahn and Meitner worked together extensively to investigate radioactivity using her physics expertise and his chemistry background. Protactinium was identified as a new element in 1918.

Pierre Victor Auger, a French chemist, found the radiationless transition discovered by Meitner in 1923 and gave it his name.

Meitner was compelled to leave Germany for Sweden following the Anschluss of Austria in 1938. She kept working at Manne Siegbahn's Stockholm institute despite receiving little help, in part due to Siegbahn's sexism. Throughout the month of November, Hahn and Meitner secretly convened in Copenhagen to plot out their next round of tests. Nuclear fission was first demonstrated by research conducted in Hahn's Berlin lab and reported in January 1939. Nuclear fission was coined by Meitner and her nephew, scientist Otto Frisch, in February 1939 after they published the physical explanation for the observations. As a result of the discovery, other scientists pressured Albert Einstein to write a warning letter to President Franklin D. Roosevelt, which in turn prompted the creation of the Manhattan Project.

Hahn received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1944 for his work on fission, but Meitner was not recognized for her contributions. This was in part because Hahn had minimized her importance ever since Meitner had left Germany. In 1966, Hahn, Meitner, and Strassman were given the Enrico Fermi Award in an attempt to make up for the omission of the Nobel Prize in their honor. In 1946, she came to the United States and received celebrity treatment from the American press for having "left Germany with the bomb in my purse."

Meitner moved to Cambridge, UK after retiring in 1960, and she passed away there on October 27. In 1992, the heaviest element in the universe, atomic number 109, was given the name Meitnerium (Mt) in her honor. The phrase "most important woman scientist of the 20th century" is often used to describe Lise Meitner.

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