Berta Karlik (1904-1990) was an Austrian physicist, that is credited with discovering three radioisotopes of Astatine from radiation that was present in nature. Astatine is the rarest element present on Earth. In any given time, there is less than 1 g of astatine present. She also became the first female professor at the University of Vienna. This article is our 12th installment of Women in Nuclear History
1) Berta Karlik was born in Vienna on January 24, 1904, to an upper class Austrian family. She spent the majority of her life in Vienna and she died there.
2) She was an excellent student not only in sciences; she learned to play the piano as well as speak and write in French, Dutch and English besides German.
3) She received a Ph.D. at the University of Vienna in 1928. During her studies she worked in Hans Pettersson’s research group at the Radium Research Institute in Vienna.
4) From 1930 Karlik worked at a laboratory run by William Henry Bragg in London. She was engaged in the crystallography studies and used X-rays to examine the structure of crystals. She developed crystallographic methods for studying hydrocarbons and co-wrote a book on crystallography data.
5) During the Second World War, while working for the Radium Research Institute in Vienna, she made her most important discovery, that the element with the atomic number 85, Astatine, was a product of natural decay found in nature. Before her discovery, Astatine could only be produced artificially from bombarding Bismuth with alpha particles by use of the cyclotron.
6) Karlik worked in a group on seawater research, mixing knowledge of oceanography and radioactivity. Karlik helped to bring up concerns about the biological issue of Uranium contamination of seawater.
7) She became the first female full professor at the University of Vienna in 1956 and worked there until her death.
8) She visited the Curie Institute in France and had a regular correspondence with Marie Curie and Lise Meitner (who was also Austrian). She worked with other women: Traude Bernert, Ellen Gledish, Ellie Knaggs, Helen Gilchrist and Eva Resmtedt.
9) She received the Austrian Academy of Sciences’ Haitinger Prize twice and the Prize of the City of Vienna. She was a founding member of the Austrian Physical Society and a member of the planning staff of CERN.
10) She retired in 1973, but worked at the Institute until her death on February 4, 1990.
References:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berta_Karlik
https://geschichte.univie.ac.at/en/persons/berta-karlik
Berta Karlik Lecture 2023: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h-dFzA2acV8