Olivia Campbell Tells Forgotten Story of 'Sisters in Science' Escaping Nazis

New York Times bestselling author, Olivia Campbell, joins Writer’s Voices to discuss her captivating new book, Sisters in Science: How Four Women Physicists Escaped Nazi Germany and Made Scientific History. Her book tells the true story of four female scientists living in Germany during WWII who were forced to leave their jobs and their country once the Nazis seized power. Set during a time when it was nearly impossible for women to even attend universities, these women, Lise Meitner, Hedwig Kohn, Hertha Sponer, and Hildegard Stücklen, not only received an education and earned advanced degrees in science, but became experts in the field of physics. For Campbell, the hardships that these women faced and their remarkable persistence in spite of what was happening around them was what drew her to write their story. “…There’s so much against you. There’s people working actively against you, there’s people telling you to your face you don’t belong here, people writing about you in papers saying you don’t belong here. It’s just incredible to me and that they still persisted. Even amidst all this, yes, these are some of the first women to get physics degrees. Some of the first women to be allowed to attend universities in Germany at this time, so they were not welcome.”

During her research, Campbell came across some surprising discoveries, not just about the four women, but also about the European science community as a whole. “I think I was surprised by how, sort of, tight-knit these scientific communities were. I think it’s hard to fathom as an American, like, how tiny European countries are and just how interconnected the scientific community was, how long scientific studies were taking… there’s a lot of stops and starts, and the fact that these incredible scientists could also be stumped by things… there were concepts that they didn’t understand either, and I thought that was really interesting and really refreshing that it wasn’t just me, that this was over my head, that even someone so advanced in physics there were aspects of what was being discovered that were really out there.”