The discovery of nuclear fission by Lise Meitner and Otto Hahn in December 1938 generated intense interest among physicists. The news was brought to the United States by Danish physicist Niels Bohr, who opened the Fifth Washington Conference on Theoretical Physics with Enrico Fermi on January 26, 1939. The results were quickly corroborated by experimental physicists, most notably Fermi and John R. Dunning at Columbia University.