A story worth telling about four women scientists whose names you should know but don't.

Maybe you've heard of Lise Meitner. Originally from Austria, she was the first woman to become a full professor of physics in Germany. He also helped discover nuclear fission. However, the 1944 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for that achievement was awarded solely to his lifelong collaborator, Otto Hahn.

Meitner fought misogyny and sexism at every stage of her illustrious career. But growing anti-Semitism and the Nazi takeover of Germany in 1933 were an even bigger problem. Although she had converted to Lutheranism, her Jewish heritage put her in danger. With the help of friends, she was able to flee in 1938 to neutral Sweden, where she was safe but scientifically isolated. “I will never be able to talk about my experiments with anyone who understands them,” he wrote to fellow physicist Hedwig Kohn.

In “Sisters in Science,” Olivia Campbell tells the intertwined stories of Meitner and three other notable but lesser-known German physicists: Kohn, Hertha Sponer, and Hildegard Stücklen. Only Kohn was Jewish, but the Third Reich's hostility toward women academics also cost the other two their jobs.

The three eventually made it to the United States, where they continued their careers and continued to support each other (and Meitner as well). Kohn, the last to escape, did not manage to leave Europe until 1940. She endured two months of arduous travel through the Soviet Union and Japan and across the Pacific Ocean, barely surviving the ordeal.

Hers is an inspiring story and one worth telling, all the more so because, as Campbell points out in her dedication, many other women academics were murdered by the Nazis. “His absence haunts this book; the impact of his loss affects us all,” he writes.

But despite its intrinsic interest, “Sisters in Science” is a sometimes frustrating read. Part of the problem is its ambitious scope. Group biography is a complicated genre. Campbell has to merge four narrative arcs: parallel at times, overlapping at others, but also divergent. A more elegant stylist, or a true adept of non-fiction narrative, would have managed to integrate these stories more fluidly. It doesn't help that Campbell refers to his protagonists by their first names, and three of the four begin with the letter “H.”

Explaining physics to a non-specialized audience is another challenge, perhaps insurmountable. Campbell tries it only nominally. The idea of ​​fission, the splitting of atomic nuclei and the consequent production of large amounts of energy, is more or less intelligible. But the achievements of the other three physicists, who worked in spectroscopy, optics and astrophysics, are more difficult to understand.

The book would also have benefited from better editing and fact-checking. Whatever her bona fides as a science journalist, Campbell is not comfortable with the Holocaust story. An example: Campbell places Dachau, the first Nazi concentration camp, in Oranienburg, a suburb of Berlin. Dachau opened its doors in 1933 in the city of Dachau, near Munich. Oranienburg was actually home to another camp of the same name and then, in 1936, Sachsenhausen.

There are other errors and unhappiness. Campbell continually refers to Kristallnacht, the Nazi pogrom of November 1938, as “the Kristallnacht.” A more serious error is his anachronistic suggestion that, in 1938, Meitner feared being deported to a “death camp.” Camps like Dachau and Sachsenhausen were brutal, often murderous places, but in the 1930s they mostly housed Nazi political opponents (some of them Jews). Jews were not yet being deported from Germany, and the six extermination camps dedicated to their extermination (places such as Sobibor, Treblinka, and Auschwitz-Birkenau, all in Poland) did not come into operation. until the early 1940s.

It is also crude, and possibly inaccurate, to say that Kristallnacht “exposed the Nazis' true agenda for the Jewish people: they wanted them all dead.” Despite the growing virulence of anti-Jewish persecution, that goal was still unclear, nor was it official policy. In fact, although some were murdered, most of the approximately 30,000 Jewish men detained and taken to concentration camps during Kristallnacht were released on the condition that they emigrate.

Presumably Campbell is on firmer ground in other respects: noting, for example, the difficulties faced by women scientists in Germany, including struggles over pay, laboratory space, and recognition; and by emphasizing the ways in which they, and some sympathetic male colleagues, helped each other endure, prosper, and eventually escape.

When Meitner first became Hahn's assistant in Berlin, for example, she was exiled from the main laboratory and trapped in a basement workshop without a nearby bathroom. He eventually came to head the physics department at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Chemistry in Berlin, a position he held even after his dismissal from the University of Berlin in the Nazi era.

Some male scientists were totally against women. Others, like Max Planck, appreciated the collaboration of only the most exceptional of their female peers. A heroic champion of women in science was Nobel laureate James Franck. A German Jew, he resigned from his position at the University of Göttingen before he was fired, emigrated to the United States via Denmark and was later instrumental in helping colleagues, including women, who were left behind.

Franck and Sponer, his former assistant, were especially close: friends and scientific collaborators. After a stint at the University of Oslo, Sponer accepted a position at Duke University in North Carolina in 1936 and began working with Edward Teller, the eventual creator of the hydrogen bomb, “on the vibrational excitation of polyatomic molecules by electron collisions.

Only after the death of Franck's wife in 1942 did his long-standing romance with Sponer come true. He remained at the University of Chicago and she at Duke. But in 1946 they married and, according to Campbell's sympathetic account, experienced true happiness amid the sorrows that surrounded them.

Julia M. Klein is a reporter and cultural critic in Philadelphia.