CORRESPONDENCE

It is true that we are suffering from bud­ Hahn's Nobel was well deserved get cuts more than non-university research institutions. The well-being of the universi­ SIR - I read with interest the repore on the for to Hahn (or perhaps to Hahn ties is evidently not high on our politicians' internal debates in the Nobel committee and his collaborator Strassmann). Whether priority list. For example, the decision not to that preceded the award of the Meitner (perhaps with Frisch, that excellent house the Institute for Molecular Pharma­ to in 1945. I am one of the few theoretician) should have been given the cology in existing buildings close to the surviving witnesses of Hahn's studies ­ prize for for first confirming the the­ medical school of the Free University but, ing to the discovery of fission, oretical correctness of Hahn's interpretation instead, to erect a new building on the site although I knew nothing at the time about of his result is an open question. I think of a non-university institution, is just anoth­ the details. Hahn himself would gladly have accepted er instance of the political myopia that fails As a young theoretical physicist, I worked that. But the discovery itself was clearly to see how the quality of university research for six months in 1936 with in Hahn's. will be reflected in the qualifications of the her section of the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Institut Carl Friedrich v. Weizsacker next generation of researchers. Neverthe­ fiir Chemic in -, of which Maximilianstrasse 14c, less, I am happy to report that more than Hahn was the director. I then went to the D-82319 Starnberg, 700 full , about 3,000 scientists, Kaiser-Wilhelm-lnstitut fiir Physik, also in and 49,000 students are still working hard Berlin-Dahlem, five minutes' walk away. In and successfully at the Free University of the last week of 1938, Hahn telephoned and SIR - Crawford et al. 1 deserve credit for Berlin. So we are suffering because of short­ asked me: "Can you imagine a their Commentary article in which they shed sighted politics but wreaths are premature. which in every chemical separation does not more on the circumstances leading Klaus Roth go with radium but with ?" I asked: to the award in 1945 of the 1944 Nobel prize Free University of Berlin, "Do you have such a substance?" He to Otto Hahn. Thielallee 66, answered "Yes". I said: "Perhaps it is really However, their statement that "Hahn D-14195 Berlin, barium." He said: "Yes, but then the urani­ and his colleagues immediately began writ­ Germany um nucleus must have been split." This ing Meitner out of the discovery of nuclear shows that he really had discovered and fission" when, on 6 August 1945, during identified the splitting of uranium. But, as their detention at Farm Hall, they heard Plants and AIDS an empirically working , he felt about the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, is a somewhat uncertain about it and so he rather one-sided portrayal. SIR-The News story "Chemistry asked me, as a theoretical physicist, whether As can be seen from reports by Major takes over Islamic science organization" I believed it. T. H. Rittner, their British 'host' at Farm ( 382, 487; 1996) incorrectly states When he wrote to Meitner, who was then Hall, the det