Looking over older Wall Street Journals piled up since my mother's death a some months ago, I was struck by a review of a biography of Enrico Fermi. Allow me to quote a bit from that review by Jeremy Bernstein on David N. Schwartz' "The Last Man Who Knew Everything" dated December 16-17, 2017, p. C15 of that WSJ:
...."[Fermi] published a paper describing his discovery of "transuranic" elements, which was one of the achievements for which he was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1938. Not long afterward, however, a chemist named Ida Noddack published a brief note in which she took issue with Fermi. Mr. Schwartz incorrectly identifies Noddack as a physicist. Perhaps if she had been a physicist she would have asked more questions--such as how the process she was suggesting could conserve energy, a basic requirement of physics. She proposed that the neutron, rather than being absorbed to form a nucleus heavier than the original uranium, had broken up the uranium nucleus 'into several large fragments.' Indeed fission [as we here at the LF know] involves cleaving of the nucleus into two large fragments. Noddack's suggestion was rejected at first because it seemed to violate the conservation-of-energy requirement and because she proposed no mechanism by which the process could take place. That such a process could conserve energy was first explained in December 1938 by Lise Meitner and her nephew Otto Frisch."
Bernstein, the reviewer, who is likely a physicist, recommends this book, but points to a fair number of scientific errors. At the end of this WSJ review, he also "recommend[s] 'The Pope of Physics' by Gino Segrè and Bettina Hoerlin for a scientifically accurate biography."