June 6, 2025 • 40 mins
Lise Meitner has fought for her entire life to be seen as a scientist, slowly building a career as a nuclear physicist in Berlin. When Adolf Hitler rises to power, the small gains she's made are snatched away. As a Jewish woman, Lise has a critical decision to make: is her passion for science worth her life?
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:15):
Pushkin. Can anyone or anything be truly altruistic? Can incredible
acts of kindness cause more harm than good? And what's
the most effective way of doing good? I'm sure that
the best selling author Michael Lewis will have some interesting
thoughts because the world's most notorious effective altruist, Sam Banguin Freed,
(00:41):
is the subject of Michael's book Going Infinite. I'm going
to be talking to Michael about that relationship and his
latest book, Who Is Government. But I want your help
to explore the theme of altruism with Michael Lewis, So
please send all of your kindness related questions from Michael
Lewis to tales at Pushkin dot fm. This episode is
(01:05):
based on the book The Woman Who Split the Atom
Marissa Moss. July the thirteenth, nineteen thirty eight, Berlin, Lisa
Mightner is terrified. She's being driven to the railway station
(01:26):
to get on a slow stopping train to Neuveshance, a
small town across the border in the Netherlands. It's a
desperate final throw of the dice. Lisamightner is a scientist,
and new restrictions under the Nazi government forbid scientists from emigrating,
so she can't leave. But Lisamightner is also Jewish, meaning
(01:51):
that she has no rights at all if she stays.
Against all the odds, Miightner has carved out a career
as a respected physicist. It was hard, very hard, and
she doesn't want to give it up. Her Jewish colleague
Albert Einstein, was visiting the United States when Hitler came
(02:12):
to power. Now he has a job at Princeton. Other
Jewish scientists, less famous than Einstein have also left. Sometimes
they found good positions, sometimes they had to take whatever
they could, but they left. As a woman in a
man's world, Lisa Miitner didn't think she had any chance
(02:34):
of getting a job to match what she had achieved
in Berlin. A professorship, a salary, a pension, and far
more important than any of that, a modern laboratory in
which to do physics. Nothing else really mattered, And so
alone she had stayed while things got worse and worse
(02:59):
and worse. Her friends have been worried about her. They've
been begging her to get out before it's too late. Reluctantly,
Miightner has agreed. She's decided to make a break for
the border. But maybe it is too late. The man
driving her is her friend, Paul Rossbard. He's a science editor.
(03:24):
As they approached the railway station, she starts to panic.
The plan is absurd. She's small and dark haired. She
doesn't look arian. She has no passport. The station and
the train will be crawling with guards. She begs Rossbard
to turn back. Rossbard keeps going. What Miightner doesn't realize
(03:49):
is that he leads a double life. He's a spy
working with British intelligence. He's not going to let one
of the world's most brilliant atomic physicists stay in Germany
any longer, so he soothes her. She's going to be fine.
Nobody's going to suspect anything. She has a small suitcase,
(04:10):
it doesn't look like she's taking a long trip, and
she'll have company, a Dutch physicist called Dirk Costa. He'll
look after her. She has more friends rooting for her
than she realizes. The station is framed by swastikas and
packed with police patrols. Costa is smiling, friendly waiting on
(04:33):
the train. Everything's going to be fine, he explains. As
the little train chugs past village after village, each one
plastered with Nazi symbols. The Dutch border officials are expecting us.
Everything's arranged, and if the ESSs stop us, she wonders.
(04:55):
She knows many people who've been arrested on trains and
dragged back to Berlin. Costa is nervous himself, but he
pretends to be relaxed. Why would the ESSs bother with them?
And then at the border the train stops. German border
(05:16):
guards and SS officers enter the compartment where Costa and
Lisa Miitner are sitting. She shrinks in her seat, acutely
aware that she's Jewish. She's expressly forbidden to leave the country,
and she has no passport. The SS officer stands in
front of them and holds out his hand expectantly papers
(05:43):
I'm Tim Harford and you're listening to cautionary tales. Born
(06:13):
in Vienna in eighteen seventy eight, Lisa Mightner was an
ordinary girl, or so she felt. She just happened to
be an ordinary girl who slept with a math textbook
under her pillow. Marissa Moss's biography of Miightner describes a
girl who was full of questions. Why did oil on
(06:35):
a puddle produce that strange rainbow reflection. How could numbers
describe curves carefully drawn on a grid? She dreamed of university,
just a dream since she hadn't even been able to
go to high school and Austrian universities didn't admit women. Fortunately,
(06:57):
the law in Austria changed just in time for Lisa
to fulfill her dream. She sat the ferociously difficult high
school exit exam, testing skills taught in classes she had
never been able to take. She passed, and in nineteen
oh one became the first woman at the University of
(07:19):
Vienna to study physics. It wasn't easy, small, cringingly shy,
and obviously resented by many of the professors, She nevertheless
persevered if she could do physics, all the everyday indignities
were bearable. In nineteen oh six, she earned a PhD
(07:43):
in physics. Nobody would offer an academic job to a woman,
so she built her own equipment at home and began
studying radiation. In nineteen oh seven, she published her first
scientific paper, and she decided that if her research was
to advance, she would need to move to Berlin, the
(08:06):
world center of physics at the time. That wasn't easy either. Again,
there were no job offers. The University of Berlin was
an entirely male environment. An Encyclopedia commissioned her to write
a piece about radioactivity before rescinding the offer when they
(08:27):
realized that this scholarly seeming el Miightner was nothing more
than a woman. But she made it work. She was
offered some space in the basement of Berlin's Experimental Physics Institute,
no salary, no toilets, should have to leave via the
side door and go to a hotel or restaurant down
(08:48):
the street, no access to the men's laboratories, but something
she scraped by on a small allowance from her father
and earning money for translating scientific articles. Then Lisa Meitner
met Otto Hahn and things started to check. Otto Hahn
(09:12):
wasn't a physicist like Miightner. He was a chemist, but
the new science of radiation was a place where physics
and chemistry met and worked in partnership. Hahn was easygoing
and sociable. Mightner was neither, but he was also ambitious
(09:32):
and meticulous, and he knew a good physicist when he
met one. Lisa Miightner was a good physicist. And the
fact that she was a woman didn't bother Otto Hahn.
Hahn and Mightner would work together as research partners for decades.
It was a close relationship, but also an unusual one.
(09:56):
Lisa Mightner was very reserved, very shy, Otto Hahn later recalled,
for many years, I never had a meal with her
except on official occasions, nor did we ever go for
a walk together, And yet we were really very close friends.
(10:17):
Otto was perhaps Miightner's closest friend of all. She didn't
love small talk, but she felt comfortable with Otto, and
of course when she wanted to talk about science, which
was often, Hahn was perfect. I love physics with all
my heart, she once wrote. It's a kind of personal love,
(10:43):
as one had for a person to whom one is
grateful for many things. Hahn was an expert chemist, but
he needed Miightner to interpret the results of his experiments
to understand what they were revealing about the nature of
the atom and the particles that made it up. Over
(11:03):
the first six years of their research partnership, Hahn and
Miightner published more more than twenty scientific papers. He ran
the experiments, she interpreted the physics underpinning the results, and
wrote them up. When a new research center, the Kaiser
Wilhelm Institute, was established, both Hahn and Miightner were given
(11:27):
modern laboratories on the basis of their work together. The
rest of the scientific world was beginning to admire the
work of el Meightner. The most assumed, of course, that
l Meightner was a man. But in Berlin, her colleagues
at the KWI, including Albert Einstein himself, were starting to
(11:50):
treat her neither as a man nor as a woman.
But how she wanted to be treated as a scientist.
And then came nineteen fourteen and the war. Lisa volunteered
as an X ray specialist on the Eastern Front, using
scientific discoveries to help people heal. Otto Hahn went to
(12:15):
work with the great chemist Fritz Harbor making chemical weapons.
In nineteen eighteen, Fritz Harbor was wanted by the Allies
for war crimes and was also awarded the Nobel Prize
for chemistry. Such were the contradictions of modern science. After
(12:40):
the war, at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute, Maiitner conducted and
analyzed experiments that revealed a new element, protactinium. She'd discussed
her work intensively with Hahn and so put his name
alongside hers on the scientific paper she wrote. Hahn was
promptly awarded the prestigious Emil Fisher Medal for the discovery
(13:04):
of Protactinium. Maiitner's contribution was acknowledged with the replica of
Hahn's medal. But despite the ongoing misogyny and the difficulties
of life in Germany after the First World War, Lisamightner
was flourishing. She built the first cloud chamber in Germany,
(13:25):
a vital piece of scientific equipment for investigating tiny particles.
She published a string of papers without Hahn's involvement, and
finally she was given a full professorship, the first woman
in Germany ever to hold the position. Hahn was making
three times more money than her, but progress was progress.
(13:50):
Lisa Miightner and Otto Hahn were nominated for the Nobel
Prize in Chemistry in nineteen twenty four, nineteen twenty five,
nineteen twenty nine and nineteen thirty three. Surely the prize
was just a matter of time, but something else happened.
In nineteen thirty three, Adolf Hitler became the Chancellor of Germany.
(14:16):
Cautionary tales will be back after the break. Fritz Harbur's
fate should have been a warning. In nineteen thirty three,
he was the head of their institute, the KWI. Harbor
(14:38):
was a scientific hero, the creator of the chemical process
that even today gives the world access to fertilizer, one
of the single greatest contributions any scientist has made to
human well being. He was also a war hero in
Germany thanks to his work on chemical weapons, and he
(15:01):
was also a Jew. Harbor was ordered to fire every
Jewish scientist in the KWI. He refused and resigned. Good riddance,
said the Nazi Minister for Education. He might have been
a competent scientist, but he had stocked the KWI with
(15:21):
Jewish scientists. Harbor's successor as the head of the KWI
was Max Planck. Plank was influential enough to arrange a
meeting with Adolph Hitler himself. Surely, said Plank, it wasn't
necessary to purge patriots such as Harbor. He was deeply German.
(15:44):
Hitler flew into a rage. There are no good Jews,
he shouted, there is no Jewish worthiness. As Plank tried
to apologize, Hitler became even more agitated, Plank made a
hasty exit. Harber died of a heart attack shortly afterwards,
(16:06):
and his former colleagues at the KWI waited in vain
for the official commemoration of this great scientific hero. Nothing.
Plank decided that the KWI would hold a memorial. The
authorities promptly announced that university faculty were forbidden to take
(16:27):
part in the memorial ceremony for the Jew Fritz Harbor.
Max Planck insisted that the ceremony should go ahead. When Planck, Miitner,
and Hahn arrived at the venue, there were plenty of
Nazi soldiers observing the proceedings, but the hall was packed.
(16:48):
Most professors had bowed to the pressure and stayed away,
but they had sent their wives as representatives. It was
a touching moment, but it was also ominous. If Fritz
Harbor couldn't be protected, nobody could. And the presence of
all those scientists wives showed that while many people had
(17:12):
sympathy for the way Jews were being treated, there was
a limit to how much defiance they were really willing
to show. When the Nazis came to power. Jews were
one percent of the German population, but twenty percent of
scientists were Jewish. You might think that this would make
(17:35):
them a national asset, but not a bit of it.
The Nazi complained was that the Jews had taken over
and filled the universities with their unscientific Jewish dogmas, and
some leading German scientists were happy enough to amplify this message.
The most prominent example of the damaging influence of the
(17:58):
Jews on science, wrote one Nobel laureate physicist, is provided
by mister Einstein with his theories. Every Jewish scientist who
could left, from mister Einstein himself, all the way down
the academic pecking order, everyone left except Lisamightner. What she'd
(18:26):
built up at the KWI was so essential to her
she couldn't bear to leave it. There were only so
many jobs that universities outside Germany could find for these
refugee scientists, and a woman such as Miightner would never
be a priority. If she didn't have a lab, if
(18:48):
she couldn't practice physics, what was the point of leaving
before long? Lisamightner was the last Jewish scientist in Berlin.
If she'd hoped that her colleagues would protect her, she'd
be disappointed. Max Planck tried, but hadn't been able to
(19:10):
protect Fritz Harbor. He certainly couldn't protect her. Miightner was
banned from teaching and stripped of her title and salary,
but she still had her lab. Even so, colleagues started
to worry that having a duess in the institute was
a bad look. When Miightner asked Otto Hahn to speak
(19:35):
up on her behalf, he refused. He had his own concerns.
He later recalled that the presence of l Mightner did
not make the situation better. Thus, at the yearly meetings
of the KWI, I was already seated in a less
prestigious place at the dinner table than was appropriate for
(19:58):
my position. These were, he said, painful experiences. Hahn and
Mightner had worked closely toge the other for a quarter
of a century, but now that no longer suited him,
he ended his research partnership with Lisa Miightner. Officially, that is, unofficially,
(20:21):
he was always coming to her for help in understanding
the physics behind his chemistry experiments. Not every scientist was
so complicit. Hahn's new young assistant, Fritz Strassmann, had already
been sacked for protesting the Nazi takeover of the German
Chemical Association. When Hahn hired him, Strassman again refused to
(20:45):
join the Nazi Party and lost three quarters of his
salary as a result. It was Miightner who urged Hahn
to divert research funds to help Strassman support his young family. Indeed,
Strassman was braver than she knew. For a time, his
little apartment concealed a Jewish woman on the run from
(21:06):
the Gestapo. Most of Meitner's colleagues didn't have anything like
that kind of courage. One Jewish physicist, Leo Zillard recalled
how the complicity played out. They ask, well, supposing I
would oppose this, thinking what good would I do? I
would just lose my influence, Then why should I oppose it?
(21:31):
But otto Hahn didn't just fail to oppose the Nazi rules.
He was anxious to comply. Behind Lisa Miightner's back. He
lobbed to have her dismissed so as to end the
institute's distracting Jewish problem. So much for we were really
very close friends. Having lost her salary and her title,
(21:57):
she next lost her academic apartment. She moved into a hotel,
living off her savings and continuing to go into the lab.
But by nineteen thirty eight it was to Lisa Mightner's
friends that she was in terrible danger. The KWI tried
to arrange a passport for her, without success. The authorities
(22:21):
refused to let her go, explaining that it was undesirable
to let renowned Jews leave Germany for abroad to act
there against the interests of Germany. An international network of
scientists desperately searched for a way to get Lisa out
of Germany, and with equal desperation, tried to persuade her
(22:45):
to go. The decisive moment when she tried to visit
her own laboratory and her old friend and colleague, Otto
Hahn confronted her and insisted that she leave. He has,
in essence thrown me out, she wrote in her diary,
(23:07):
and she sadly agreed to the plan to smuggle her
out of Germany. Otto Hahn did find a bit of
courage in the end. He invited Lisa to stay at
his house the night before she left, helping with her
cover story. As they said their goodbyes and agreed to
(23:27):
work together by writing letters. Otto pressed his mother's diamond
ring into Lisa's hand. Maybe it would be useful in
an emergency, he stiffly explained, she could sell it or something.
Lisa was touched and then into the car with Paul
(23:48):
Rossbard and to the station. Might Know in a panic,
and Rossbard trying to soothe her and sitting next to
Dirk cost Her on the seven hour train journey to
the Netherlands as he smoothly reassured her that nobody was
going to ask for her papers until the train stopped
at the border crossing, and standing there in front of
(24:10):
them was the SS officer and outstretched demanding to see
a passport. Lisa Mightner clutched the ring tightly, as though
somehow it might save her. She knew it couldn't. Derk Costa,
seeming calm, reached into his suit pocket and pulled out
(24:33):
his passport. The SS guard inspected it, nodded, then walked
on down the train corridor. The husband's papers were in order,
why bother to check the wife's. For decades, over and
(24:58):
over again, Lisa Mightner had been ignored, with the attention
being given to whichever man happened to be in the vicinity.
It had happened again, and this time it had saved
her life. Cautionary tales will be back. After the break,
(25:31):
the trains started moving again, crossing the border into the Netherlands.
No more swastikas or soldiers. They were free. Over the
days that followed, words spread among her friends and the
scientific community more widely. Lisa Miightner was safe. One scientist
(25:53):
sent a telegram to Dirk Costa, you have made yourself
as famous for the abroduction of Lisa Miightner as for
discovering hafnium. Back in Berlin, Hahn and his Nazi defying
assistant Strass were puzzled. In Berlin. They were continuing work
(26:13):
that Hahn had been doing with Miightner, firing neutrons at uranium,
the heaviest known naturally occurring element. They hoped to create
a new element like protactinium, which Miightner had discovered years earlier.
But instead of discovering new heavy elements as a result
of the experiment, Hahn was finding something that behaved like barium,
(26:38):
a much lighter element that just seemed impossible. It was
as though Newton's apple didn't fall from the tree, but
floated off into space. Was Hahn just making a mistake
doing sloppy chemistry. He wrote to his old collaborator, Lisa
(26:58):
Miightner to ask for her help. Miightner was safely in Stockholm,
where she'd secured a position as a junior re searcher.
All her old equipment, the best neutron sources, the best detectors,
was all sitting untouched in her lab since the day
(27:18):
she had fled Berlin. But even if she couldn't get
to it, she could at least explain to Hahn how
to use it with her guidance. He tried again, but
he was still baffled, and Miightner was puzzled too. While
Hahn was writing up his results for publication, including an
(27:41):
admission that frankly, he didn't understand what was going on,
Lisa Miightner went for a long walk with her nephew,
another physicist. It was Christmas Eve and they were staying
in the Swedish countryside for a few days. Lisa walked
and talked her nephew, skiing alongside as they bounced around
(28:03):
the problem. Maybe Hahn was just making a mistake with
the setup of his experiment, he suggested, No, she replied,
he had the best equipment, my equipment, and Otto Hahn
does not make mistakes, not in the laboratory anyway. And
(28:25):
then suddenly it came to her. She sat down on
a snow covered log, pulled out a notebook, and started
to run through some calculations. What if Hahn really had
created barium. Barium was about half the atomic weight of uranium,
(28:45):
It would mean the atom had just split in two.
Everyone assumed that couldn't happen. In his book E Equals
MC Squared, David Badanis describes it as like throwing a
pebble at a boulder, only for the bowlder to crack
in half. But Mitna realized that the uranium nucleus like
(29:09):
a boulder. There were powerful forces holding it together, but
there were also powerful forces inside it trying to push
it apart. When she did the calculations, she understood a
stream of neutrons could start to wobble it, and once
it was wobbling, a single neutron that hit at the
(29:30):
right moment would split the atom, but split it into
what Otto Hahn had found barium. Mitna realized that if
the uranium atom was literally splitting in two and one
part was barium, the other part would be krypton. The
total number of protons in a barium atom and a
(29:53):
crypton atom are the same as the protons in an
uranium atom, so that added up, and krypton was an
invisible gas. You couldn't see it, you couldn't smell it,
and so of course Hahn hadn't realized it was even there.
Miightner realized two more things linked together. First, barium and
(30:16):
krypton together have the same number of protons as uranium,
but their total mass is less. Where had the extra
mass gone? Second, once the uranium had split into barium
and krypton, those two new atoms would fly apart, repulsed
by powerful forces. Where did the energy for that come from?
(30:40):
Mass had mysteriously disappeared. Energy had mysteriously appeared. But her
old colleague Einstein had a formula for that E equals
mc squared. A little bit of mass could turn into
a vast release of energy. Miightner realized that otto Hahn
(31:03):
had split the atom and unlocked atomic energy without realize
what it had done. Einstein later wrote, I believed only
that it was theoretically possible. It was discovered by Hahn
in Berlin, and he himself misinterpreted what he discovered. It
(31:27):
was Lisa Meiitner who provided the correct interpretation. It was
the biggest discovery in physics since Einstein's theory of relativity.
But while scientists initially gave the credit to Miiitner and
her nephew, journalists increasingly tended to mention Hahn. She wrote
(31:48):
to Hahn begging him to be honest about the credit.
I don't feel at all happy, she wrote, adding that
her new colleagues in Stockholm will soon believe, especially after
your excellent results, that I didn't do anything, and that
you both did all the physics too. At Berlin, alongside
(32:09):
the tussle for credit, a much bigger struggle was developing.
Meiightner's analysis had been comprehensive, but there was one thing
she'd missed. When a neutron split an atom, other neutrons
might be emitted. Over in the United States. Meiightner's old
(32:29):
colleague Leosillard realized that those neutrons could go on to
split more nearby atoms. The result would be a chain
reaction and a colossal release of energy, a source of
power perhaps or the deadliest weapon in history. Zilard alerted Einstein.
(32:55):
Einstein alerted President Roosevelt. Secretly, work started on the atomic bomb.
But would Lisa Miiightner join the effort. Absolutely Not like Einstein,
and unlike almost all of her other peers, she refused
to be complicit in creating such a deadly weapon. After
(33:23):
Germany surrendered, Liza wrote to Otto about the behavior of
the scientists who had stayed in Germany. All of you
worked for Nazi Germany and never attempted passive resistance. Of course,
to save your troubled consciences, you occasionally helped an oppressed person. Still,
(33:47):
you let millions of innocent people be murdered, and there
was never a sound of protest. She urged him and
his colleagues to make a statement acknowledging their culpability. Hahn
never did, and indeed he never received the letter. By then,
(34:11):
he and other leading German scientists were being comfortably detained
by the British. Both Liza and Otto were pondering life
after the war, but the war wasn't over. The sudden
(34:32):
chain reaction in an atomic explosion produces temperatures hotter than
the center of the sun. On the sixth of May
nineteen forty five, one of those artificial suns appeared in
the sky nineteen hundred feet above the city of Hiroshima.
(34:53):
The full burning blast lasted about half a second, and
as it started to fade, the incredible heat radiated out
nineteen hundred feet below. Fires started, apparently for no reason.
Skin was ripped off, hanging in sheets from people's flesh.
(35:15):
A moment later, a shock wave incredible ferocity flattened Hiroshima.
When the news reached Lisa Mightno in Stockholm, she was
utterly appalled. Imagine her horror when the American press named
(35:35):
her the mother of the atomic bomb. Otto Hahn received
a different honor. The Swedish Academy awarded him the Nobel
Prize for chemistry. Somehow, the shy little lady got the
credit when it came to mass slaughter, but the charming
(35:57):
gentleman was at the front of the queue when it
was Nobel Prize time. In nineteen o three, the Swedish
Academy had tried to award the Nobel Prize in physics
to Henri Becquerel and Pierre Curie, but someone tipped off Pierre,
and he complained that his wife Mary Curi was equally deserving.
(36:21):
In the end, Mary got her share of the prize.
But Mary Curie had a loyal husband to advocate for her.
Lisa Miitner only had Otto Hahn. It was understandable that
when Hahn was in Berlin working under the Nazi regime,
he would hesitate to credit the duess who had eluded
(36:45):
the SS. After the war, some of his colleagues still
pressed him to downplay Mitner's achievement. But Hahn had a
Nobel prize. He could give credit to anyone he liked.
He could play the role that Pierre Curi played for Marie.
So when Hahn was giving his Nobel Prize acceptance speech
(37:08):
in stock Home, the adopted home of his colleague, mentor,
and very close friend, Lisa Mightner, what did he say
as she looked on from the audience. He thanked Lisamightner
for the excellent work she had done as his assistant. Afterwards,
(37:33):
Hahn complained that Miightner and her friends had been rather
frosty towards him. He couldn't understand why. Maybe they were
still bitter about Hitler, but some part of Hahn's conscience
was bothering him because he quietly gave Lisa Mightner a
large share of the Nobel Prize money. Miightner gave it
(37:56):
all to the Emergency Committee of Atomic Scientists, an organization
helping to resettle Jewish scientist refugees. Hahn wanted to forget
all about how the Jews had been treated. Miitna didn't.
She never returned to her old job in Germany, and
(38:17):
she never did get the pension they owed her. Neither
did she ever receive the Nobel Prize, despite being nominated
nineteen times for chemistry and twenty nine times for physics.
She did receive many other awards. Most poignantly, she was
(38:38):
the first recipient of the Otto Hahn Prize. Otto joked
as he handed her the medal that bore his name
that she could buy him a beer with the prize money.
Liza didn't see the funny side. This episode of Cautionary
(39:06):
Tales was based on the book The Woman Who Split
the Atom by Marissa Moss. For a full list of
our sources, see the show notes at Timharford dot com.
Cautionary Tales is written by me Tim Harford with Andrew Wright,
Alice Fines, and Ryan Dilly. It's produced by Georgia Mills
(39:28):
and Marilyn Rust. The sound design and original music are
the work of Pascal Wise. Additional sound designs by Carlos
san Juan at Brain Audio. Bend Daphaffrey edited the scripts.
The show features the voice talents of Melanie Guttridge, Stella Harford,
Oliver Hembrough, Sarah Jupp, Massam n Roe, Jamal Westman, and
(39:50):
Rufus Wright. The show also wouldn't have been possible without
the work of Jacob Weisberg, Greta Cohne, Sarah Nix, Eric Sandler,
Carrie Brody, Christina Sullivan, Kira Posey, and Owen Miller. Cautionary
Tales is a production of Pushkin Industries. It's recorded at
Wardore Stu Studios in London. Like tom Berry, if you
(40:12):
like the show, please remember to share, rate and review.
It really makes a difference to us and if you
want to hear the show, add free sign up to
Pushkin Plus on the show page on Apple Podcasts or
at pushkin dot fm, slash plus
Pushkin. Can anyone or anything be truly altruistic? Can incredible
acts of kindness cause more harm than good? And what's
the most effective way of doing good? I'm sure that
the best selling author Michael Lewis will have some interesting
thoughts because the world's most notorious effective altruist, Sam Banguin Freed,
(00:41):
is the subject of Michael's book Going Infinite. I'm going
to be talking to Michael about that relationship and his
latest book, Who Is Government. But I want your help
to explore the theme of altruism with Michael Lewis, So
please send all of your kindness related questions from Michael
Lewis to tales at Pushkin dot fm. This episode is
(01:05):
based on the book The Woman Who Split the Atom
Marissa Moss. July the thirteenth, nineteen thirty eight, Berlin, Lisa
Mightner is terrified. She's being driven to the railway station
(01:26):
to get on a slow stopping train to Neuveshance, a
small town across the border in the Netherlands. It's a
desperate final throw of the dice. Lisamightner is a scientist,
and new restrictions under the Nazi government forbid scientists from emigrating,
so she can't leave. But Lisamightner is also Jewish, meaning
(01:51):
that she has no rights at all if she stays.
Against all the odds, Miightner has carved out a career
as a respected physicist. It was hard, very hard, and
she doesn't want to give it up. Her Jewish colleague
Albert Einstein, was visiting the United States when Hitler came
(02:12):
to power. Now he has a job at Princeton. Other
Jewish scientists, less famous than Einstein have also left. Sometimes
they found good positions, sometimes they had to take whatever
they could, but they left. As a woman in a
man's world, Lisa Miitner didn't think she had any chance
(02:34):
of getting a job to match what she had achieved
in Berlin. A professorship, a salary, a pension, and far
more important than any of that, a modern laboratory in
which to do physics. Nothing else really mattered, And so
alone she had stayed while things got worse and worse
(02:59):
and worse. Her friends have been worried about her. They've
been begging her to get out before it's too late. Reluctantly,
Miightner has agreed. She's decided to make a break for
the border. But maybe it is too late. The man
driving her is her friend, Paul Rossbard. He's a science editor.
(03:24):
As they approached the railway station, she starts to panic.
The plan is absurd. She's small and dark haired. She
doesn't look arian. She has no passport. The station and
the train will be crawling with guards. She begs Rossbard
to turn back. Rossbard keeps going. What Miightner doesn't realize
(03:49):
is that he leads a double life. He's a spy
working with British intelligence. He's not going to let one
of the world's most brilliant atomic physicists stay in Germany
any longer, so he soothes her. She's going to be fine.
Nobody's going to suspect anything. She has a small suitcase,
(04:10):
it doesn't look like she's taking a long trip, and
she'll have company, a Dutch physicist called Dirk Costa. He'll
look after her. She has more friends rooting for her
than she realizes. The station is framed by swastikas and
packed with police patrols. Costa is smiling, friendly waiting on
(04:33):
the train. Everything's going to be fine, he explains. As
the little train chugs past village after village, each one
plastered with Nazi symbols. The Dutch border officials are expecting us.
Everything's arranged, and if the ESSs stop us, she wonders.
(04:55):
She knows many people who've been arrested on trains and
dragged back to Berlin. Costa is nervous himself, but he
pretends to be relaxed. Why would the ESSs bother with them?
And then at the border the train stops. German border
(05:16):
guards and SS officers enter the compartment where Costa and
Lisa Miitner are sitting. She shrinks in her seat, acutely
aware that she's Jewish. She's expressly forbidden to leave the country,
and she has no passport. The SS officer stands in
front of them and holds out his hand expectantly papers
(05:43):
I'm Tim Harford and you're listening to cautionary tales. Born
(06:13):
in Vienna in eighteen seventy eight, Lisa Mightner was an
ordinary girl, or so she felt. She just happened to
be an ordinary girl who slept with a math textbook
under her pillow. Marissa Moss's biography of Miightner describes a
girl who was full of questions. Why did oil on
(06:35):
a puddle produce that strange rainbow reflection. How could numbers
describe curves carefully drawn on a grid? She dreamed of university,
just a dream since she hadn't even been able to
go to high school and Austrian universities didn't admit women. Fortunately,
(06:57):
the law in Austria changed just in time for Lisa
to fulfill her dream. She sat the ferociously difficult high
school exit exam, testing skills taught in classes she had
never been able to take. She passed, and in nineteen
oh one became the first woman at the University of
(07:19):
Vienna to study physics. It wasn't easy, small, cringingly shy,
and obviously resented by many of the professors, She nevertheless
persevered if she could do physics, all the everyday indignities
were bearable. In nineteen oh six, she earned a PhD
(07:43):
in physics. Nobody would offer an academic job to a woman,
so she built her own equipment at home and began
studying radiation. In nineteen oh seven, she published her first
scientific paper, and she decided that if her research was
to advance, she would need to move to Berlin, the
(08:06):
world center of physics at the time. That wasn't easy either. Again,
there were no job offers. The University of Berlin was
an entirely male environment. An Encyclopedia commissioned her to write
a piece about radioactivity before rescinding the offer when they
(08:27):
realized that this scholarly seeming el Miightner was nothing more
than a woman. But she made it work. She was
offered some space in the basement of Berlin's Experimental Physics Institute,
no salary, no toilets, should have to leave via the
side door and go to a hotel or restaurant down
(08:48):
the street, no access to the men's laboratories, but something
she scraped by on a small allowance from her father
and earning money for translating scientific articles. Then Lisa Meitner
met Otto Hahn and things started to check. Otto Hahn
(09:12):
wasn't a physicist like Miightner. He was a chemist, but
the new science of radiation was a place where physics
and chemistry met and worked in partnership. Hahn was easygoing
and sociable. Mightner was neither, but he was also ambitious
(09:32):
and meticulous, and he knew a good physicist when he
met one. Lisa Miightner was a good physicist. And the
fact that she was a woman didn't bother Otto Hahn.
Hahn and Mightner would work together as research partners for decades.
It was a close relationship, but also an unusual one.
(09:56):
Lisa Mightner was very reserved, very shy, Otto Hahn later recalled,
for many years, I never had a meal with her
except on official occasions, nor did we ever go for
a walk together, And yet we were really very close friends.
(10:17):
Otto was perhaps Miightner's closest friend of all. She didn't
love small talk, but she felt comfortable with Otto, and
of course when she wanted to talk about science, which
was often, Hahn was perfect. I love physics with all
my heart, she once wrote. It's a kind of personal love,
(10:43):
as one had for a person to whom one is
grateful for many things. Hahn was an expert chemist, but
he needed Miightner to interpret the results of his experiments
to understand what they were revealing about the nature of
the atom and the particles that made it up. Over
(11:03):
the first six years of their research partnership, Hahn and
Miightner published more more than twenty scientific papers. He ran
the experiments, she interpreted the physics underpinning the results, and
wrote them up. When a new research center, the Kaiser
Wilhelm Institute, was established, both Hahn and Miightner were given
(11:27):
modern laboratories on the basis of their work together. The
rest of the scientific world was beginning to admire the
work of el Meightner. The most assumed, of course, that
l Meightner was a man. But in Berlin, her colleagues
at the KWI, including Albert Einstein himself, were starting to
(11:50):
treat her neither as a man nor as a woman.
But how she wanted to be treated as a scientist.
And then came nineteen fourteen and the war. Lisa volunteered
as an X ray specialist on the Eastern Front, using
scientific discoveries to help people heal. Otto Hahn went to
(12:15):
work with the great chemist Fritz Harbor making chemical weapons.
In nineteen eighteen, Fritz Harbor was wanted by the Allies
for war crimes and was also awarded the Nobel Prize
for chemistry. Such were the contradictions of modern science. After
(12:40):
the war, at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute, Maiitner conducted and
analyzed experiments that revealed a new element, protactinium. She'd discussed
her work intensively with Hahn and so put his name
alongside hers on the scientific paper she wrote. Hahn was
promptly awarded the prestigious Emil Fisher Medal for the discovery
(13:04):
of Protactinium. Maiitner's contribution was acknowledged with the replica of
Hahn's medal. But despite the ongoing misogyny and the difficulties
of life in Germany after the First World War, Lisamightner
was flourishing. She built the first cloud chamber in Germany,
(13:25):
a vital piece of scientific equipment for investigating tiny particles.
She published a string of papers without Hahn's involvement, and
finally she was given a full professorship, the first woman
in Germany ever to hold the position. Hahn was making
three times more money than her, but progress was progress.
(13:50):
Lisa Miightner and Otto Hahn were nominated for the Nobel
Prize in Chemistry in nineteen twenty four, nineteen twenty five,
nineteen twenty nine and nineteen thirty three. Surely the prize
was just a matter of time, but something else happened.
In nineteen thirty three, Adolf Hitler became the Chancellor of Germany.
(14:16):
Cautionary tales will be back after the break. Fritz Harbur's
fate should have been a warning. In nineteen thirty three,
he was the head of their institute, the KWI. Harbor
(14:38):
was a scientific hero, the creator of the chemical process
that even today gives the world access to fertilizer, one
of the single greatest contributions any scientist has made to
human well being. He was also a war hero in
Germany thanks to his work on chemical weapons, and he
(15:01):
was also a Jew. Harbor was ordered to fire every
Jewish scientist in the KWI. He refused and resigned. Good riddance,
said the Nazi Minister for Education. He might have been
a competent scientist, but he had stocked the KWI with
(15:21):
Jewish scientists. Harbor's successor as the head of the KWI
was Max Planck. Plank was influential enough to arrange a
meeting with Adolph Hitler himself. Surely, said Plank, it wasn't
necessary to purge patriots such as Harbor. He was deeply German.
(15:44):
Hitler flew into a rage. There are no good Jews,
he shouted, there is no Jewish worthiness. As Plank tried
to apologize, Hitler became even more agitated, Plank made a
hasty exit. Harber died of a heart attack shortly afterwards,
(16:06):
and his former colleagues at the KWI waited in vain
for the official commemoration of this great scientific hero. Nothing.
Plank decided that the KWI would hold a memorial. The
authorities promptly announced that university faculty were forbidden to take
(16:27):
part in the memorial ceremony for the Jew Fritz Harbor.
Max Planck insisted that the ceremony should go ahead. When Planck, Miitner,
and Hahn arrived at the venue, there were plenty of
Nazi soldiers observing the proceedings, but the hall was packed.
(16:48):
Most professors had bowed to the pressure and stayed away,
but they had sent their wives as representatives. It was
a touching moment, but it was also ominous. If Fritz
Harbor couldn't be protected, nobody could. And the presence of
all those scientists wives showed that while many people had
(17:12):
sympathy for the way Jews were being treated, there was
a limit to how much defiance they were really willing
to show. When the Nazis came to power. Jews were
one percent of the German population, but twenty percent of
scientists were Jewish. You might think that this would make
(17:35):
them a national asset, but not a bit of it.
The Nazi complained was that the Jews had taken over
and filled the universities with their unscientific Jewish dogmas, and
some leading German scientists were happy enough to amplify this message.
The most prominent example of the damaging influence of the
(17:58):
Jews on science, wrote one Nobel laureate physicist, is provided
by mister Einstein with his theories. Every Jewish scientist who
could left, from mister Einstein himself, all the way down
the academic pecking order, everyone left except Lisamightner. What she'd
(18:26):
built up at the KWI was so essential to her
she couldn't bear to leave it. There were only so
many jobs that universities outside Germany could find for these
refugee scientists, and a woman such as Miightner would never
be a priority. If she didn't have a lab, if
(18:48):
she couldn't practice physics, what was the point of leaving
before long? Lisamightner was the last Jewish scientist in Berlin.
If she'd hoped that her colleagues would protect her, she'd
be disappointed. Max Planck tried, but hadn't been able to
(19:10):
protect Fritz Harbor. He certainly couldn't protect her. Miightner was
banned from teaching and stripped of her title and salary,
but she still had her lab. Even so, colleagues started
to worry that having a duess in the institute was
a bad look. When Miightner asked Otto Hahn to speak
(19:35):
up on her behalf, he refused. He had his own concerns.
He later recalled that the presence of l Mightner did
not make the situation better. Thus, at the yearly meetings
of the KWI, I was already seated in a less
prestigious place at the dinner table than was appropriate for
(19:58):
my position. These were, he said, painful experiences. Hahn and
Mightner had worked closely toge the other for a quarter
of a century, but now that no longer suited him,
he ended his research partnership with Lisa Miightner. Officially, that is, unofficially,
(20:21):
he was always coming to her for help in understanding
the physics behind his chemistry experiments. Not every scientist was
so complicit. Hahn's new young assistant, Fritz Strassmann, had already
been sacked for protesting the Nazi takeover of the German
Chemical Association. When Hahn hired him, Strassman again refused to
(20:45):
join the Nazi Party and lost three quarters of his
salary as a result. It was Miightner who urged Hahn
to divert research funds to help Strassman support his young family. Indeed,
Strassman was braver than she knew. For a time, his
little apartment concealed a Jewish woman on the run from
(21:06):
the Gestapo. Most of Meitner's colleagues didn't have anything like
that kind of courage. One Jewish physicist, Leo Zillard recalled
how the complicity played out. They ask, well, supposing I
would oppose this, thinking what good would I do? I
would just lose my influence, Then why should I oppose it?
(21:31):
But otto Hahn didn't just fail to oppose the Nazi rules.
He was anxious to comply. Behind Lisa Miightner's back. He
lobbed to have her dismissed so as to end the
institute's distracting Jewish problem. So much for we were really
very close friends. Having lost her salary and her title,
(21:57):
she next lost her academic apartment. She moved into a hotel,
living off her savings and continuing to go into the lab.
But by nineteen thirty eight it was to Lisa Mightner's
friends that she was in terrible danger. The KWI tried
to arrange a passport for her, without success. The authorities
(22:21):
refused to let her go, explaining that it was undesirable
to let renowned Jews leave Germany for abroad to act
there against the interests of Germany. An international network of
scientists desperately searched for a way to get Lisa out
of Germany, and with equal desperation, tried to persuade her
(22:45):
to go. The decisive moment when she tried to visit
her own laboratory and her old friend and colleague, Otto
Hahn confronted her and insisted that she leave. He has,
in essence thrown me out, she wrote in her diary,
(23:07):
and she sadly agreed to the plan to smuggle her
out of Germany. Otto Hahn did find a bit of
courage in the end. He invited Lisa to stay at
his house the night before she left, helping with her
cover story. As they said their goodbyes and agreed to
(23:27):
work together by writing letters. Otto pressed his mother's diamond
ring into Lisa's hand. Maybe it would be useful in
an emergency, he stiffly explained, she could sell it or something.
Lisa was touched and then into the car with Paul
(23:48):
Rossbard and to the station. Might Know in a panic,
and Rossbard trying to soothe her and sitting next to
Dirk cost Her on the seven hour train journey to
the Netherlands as he smoothly reassured her that nobody was
going to ask for her papers until the train stopped
at the border crossing, and standing there in front of
(24:10):
them was the SS officer and outstretched demanding to see
a passport. Lisa Mightner clutched the ring tightly, as though
somehow it might save her. She knew it couldn't. Derk Costa,
seeming calm, reached into his suit pocket and pulled out
(24:33):
his passport. The SS guard inspected it, nodded, then walked
on down the train corridor. The husband's papers were in order,
why bother to check the wife's. For decades, over and
(24:58):
over again, Lisa Mightner had been ignored, with the attention
being given to whichever man happened to be in the vicinity.
It had happened again, and this time it had saved
her life. Cautionary tales will be back. After the break,
(25:31):
the trains started moving again, crossing the border into the Netherlands.
No more swastikas or soldiers. They were free. Over the
days that followed, words spread among her friends and the
scientific community more widely. Lisa Miightner was safe. One scientist
(25:53):
sent a telegram to Dirk Costa, you have made yourself
as famous for the abroduction of Lisa Miightner as for
discovering hafnium. Back in Berlin, Hahn and his Nazi defying
assistant Strass were puzzled. In Berlin. They were continuing work
(26:13):
that Hahn had been doing with Miightner, firing neutrons at uranium,
the heaviest known naturally occurring element. They hoped to create
a new element like protactinium, which Miightner had discovered years earlier.
But instead of discovering new heavy elements as a result
of the experiment, Hahn was finding something that behaved like barium,
(26:38):
a much lighter element that just seemed impossible. It was
as though Newton's apple didn't fall from the tree, but
floated off into space. Was Hahn just making a mistake
doing sloppy chemistry. He wrote to his old collaborator, Lisa
(26:58):
Miightner to ask for her help. Miightner was safely in Stockholm,
where she'd secured a position as a junior re searcher.
All her old equipment, the best neutron sources, the best detectors,
was all sitting untouched in her lab since the day
(27:18):
she had fled Berlin. But even if she couldn't get
to it, she could at least explain to Hahn how
to use it with her guidance. He tried again, but
he was still baffled, and Miightner was puzzled too. While
Hahn was writing up his results for publication, including an
(27:41):
admission that frankly, he didn't understand what was going on,
Lisa Miightner went for a long walk with her nephew,
another physicist. It was Christmas Eve and they were staying
in the Swedish countryside for a few days. Lisa walked
and talked her nephew, skiing alongside as they bounced around
(28:03):
the problem. Maybe Hahn was just making a mistake with
the setup of his experiment, he suggested, No, she replied,
he had the best equipment, my equipment, and Otto Hahn
does not make mistakes, not in the laboratory anyway. And
(28:25):
then suddenly it came to her. She sat down on
a snow covered log, pulled out a notebook, and started
to run through some calculations. What if Hahn really had
created barium. Barium was about half the atomic weight of uranium,
(28:45):
It would mean the atom had just split in two.
Everyone assumed that couldn't happen. In his book E Equals
MC Squared, David Badanis describes it as like throwing a
pebble at a boulder, only for the bowlder to crack
in half. But Mitna realized that the uranium nucleus like
(29:09):
a boulder. There were powerful forces holding it together, but
there were also powerful forces inside it trying to push
it apart. When she did the calculations, she understood a
stream of neutrons could start to wobble it, and once
it was wobbling, a single neutron that hit at the
(29:30):
right moment would split the atom, but split it into
what Otto Hahn had found barium. Mitna realized that if
the uranium atom was literally splitting in two and one
part was barium, the other part would be krypton. The
total number of protons in a barium atom and a
(29:53):
crypton atom are the same as the protons in an
uranium atom, so that added up, and krypton was an
invisible gas. You couldn't see it, you couldn't smell it,
and so of course Hahn hadn't realized it was even there.
Miightner realized two more things linked together. First, barium and
(30:16):
krypton together have the same number of protons as uranium,
but their total mass is less. Where had the extra
mass gone? Second, once the uranium had split into barium
and krypton, those two new atoms would fly apart, repulsed
by powerful forces. Where did the energy for that come from?
(30:40):
Mass had mysteriously disappeared. Energy had mysteriously appeared. But her
old colleague Einstein had a formula for that E equals
mc squared. A little bit of mass could turn into
a vast release of energy. Miightner realized that otto Hahn
(31:03):
had split the atom and unlocked atomic energy without realize
what it had done. Einstein later wrote, I believed only
that it was theoretically possible. It was discovered by Hahn
in Berlin, and he himself misinterpreted what he discovered. It
(31:27):
was Lisa Meiitner who provided the correct interpretation. It was
the biggest discovery in physics since Einstein's theory of relativity.
But while scientists initially gave the credit to Miiitner and
her nephew, journalists increasingly tended to mention Hahn. She wrote
(31:48):
to Hahn begging him to be honest about the credit.
I don't feel at all happy, she wrote, adding that
her new colleagues in Stockholm will soon believe, especially after
your excellent results, that I didn't do anything, and that
you both did all the physics too. At Berlin, alongside
(32:09):
the tussle for credit, a much bigger struggle was developing.
Meiightner's analysis had been comprehensive, but there was one thing
she'd missed. When a neutron split an atom, other neutrons
might be emitted. Over in the United States. Meiightner's old
(32:29):
colleague Leosillard realized that those neutrons could go on to
split more nearby atoms. The result would be a chain
reaction and a colossal release of energy, a source of
power perhaps or the deadliest weapon in history. Zilard alerted Einstein.
(32:55):
Einstein alerted President Roosevelt. Secretly, work started on the atomic bomb.
But would Lisa Miiightner join the effort. Absolutely Not like Einstein,
and unlike almost all of her other peers, she refused
to be complicit in creating such a deadly weapon. After
(33:23):
Germany surrendered, Liza wrote to Otto about the behavior of
the scientists who had stayed in Germany. All of you
worked for Nazi Germany and never attempted passive resistance. Of course,
to save your troubled consciences, you occasionally helped an oppressed person. Still,
(33:47):
you let millions of innocent people be murdered, and there
was never a sound of protest. She urged him and
his colleagues to make a statement acknowledging their culpability. Hahn
never did, and indeed he never received the letter. By then,
(34:11):
he and other leading German scientists were being comfortably detained
by the British. Both Liza and Otto were pondering life
after the war, but the war wasn't over. The sudden
(34:32):
chain reaction in an atomic explosion produces temperatures hotter than
the center of the sun. On the sixth of May
nineteen forty five, one of those artificial suns appeared in
the sky nineteen hundred feet above the city of Hiroshima.
(34:53):
The full burning blast lasted about half a second, and
as it started to fade, the incredible heat radiated out
nineteen hundred feet below. Fires started, apparently for no reason.
Skin was ripped off, hanging in sheets from people's flesh.
(35:15):
A moment later, a shock wave incredible ferocity flattened Hiroshima.
When the news reached Lisa Mightno in Stockholm, she was
utterly appalled. Imagine her horror when the American press named
(35:35):
her the mother of the atomic bomb. Otto Hahn received
a different honor. The Swedish Academy awarded him the Nobel
Prize for chemistry. Somehow, the shy little lady got the
credit when it came to mass slaughter, but the charming
(35:57):
gentleman was at the front of the queue when it
was Nobel Prize time. In nineteen o three, the Swedish
Academy had tried to award the Nobel Prize in physics
to Henri Becquerel and Pierre Curie, but someone tipped off Pierre,
and he complained that his wife Mary Curi was equally deserving.
(36:21):
In the end, Mary got her share of the prize.
But Mary Curie had a loyal husband to advocate for her.
Lisa Miitner only had Otto Hahn. It was understandable that
when Hahn was in Berlin working under the Nazi regime,
he would hesitate to credit the duess who had eluded
(36:45):
the SS. After the war, some of his colleagues still
pressed him to downplay Mitner's achievement. But Hahn had a
Nobel prize. He could give credit to anyone he liked.
He could play the role that Pierre Curi played for Marie.
So when Hahn was giving his Nobel Prize acceptance speech
(37:08):
in stock Home, the adopted home of his colleague, mentor,
and very close friend, Lisa Mightner, what did he say
as she looked on from the audience. He thanked Lisamightner
for the excellent work she had done as his assistant. Afterwards,
(37:33):
Hahn complained that Miightner and her friends had been rather
frosty towards him. He couldn't understand why. Maybe they were
still bitter about Hitler, but some part of Hahn's conscience
was bothering him because he quietly gave Lisa Mightner a
large share of the Nobel Prize money. Miightner gave it
(37:56):
all to the Emergency Committee of Atomic Scientists, an organization
helping to resettle Jewish scientist refugees. Hahn wanted to forget
all about how the Jews had been treated. Miitna didn't.
She never returned to her old job in Germany, and
(38:17):
she never did get the pension they owed her. Neither
did she ever receive the Nobel Prize, despite being nominated
nineteen times for chemistry and twenty nine times for physics.
She did receive many other awards. Most poignantly, she was
(38:38):
the first recipient of the Otto Hahn Prize. Otto joked
as he handed her the medal that bore his name
that she could buy him a beer with the prize money.
Liza didn't see the funny side. This episode of Cautionary
(39:06):
Tales was based on the book The Woman Who Split
the Atom by Marissa Moss. For a full list of
our sources, see the show notes at Timharford dot com.
Cautionary Tales is written by me Tim Harford with Andrew Wright,
Alice Fines, and Ryan Dilly. It's produced by Georgia Mills
(39:28):
and Marilyn Rust. The sound design and original music are
the work of Pascal Wise. Additional sound designs by Carlos
san Juan at Brain Audio. Bend Daphaffrey edited the scripts.
The show features the voice talents of Melanie Guttridge, Stella Harford,
Oliver Hembrough, Sarah Jupp, Massam n Roe, Jamal Westman, and
(39:50):
Rufus Wright. The show also wouldn't have been possible without
the work of Jacob Weisberg, Greta Cohne, Sarah Nix, Eric Sandler,
Carrie Brody, Christina Sullivan, Kira Posey, and Owen Miller. Cautionary
Tales is a production of Pushkin Industries. It's recorded at
Wardore Stu Studios in London. Like tom Berry, if you
(40:12):
like the show, please remember to share, rate and review.
It really makes a difference to us and if you
want to hear the show, add free sign up to
Pushkin Plus on the show page on Apple Podcasts or
at pushkin dot fm, slash plus
Host
Tim Harford
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