The Woman who paved the way for women in Science
The Elements of Marie Curie
By Dava Sobel
Published by 4th Estate (2024)
When after a trip to America in 1921, Marie Curie was asked to write her autobiography, she protested it could be summed up in a single paragraph.
‘I was born in Warsaw of a family of teachers. I married Pierre Curie and had two children. I have done my work in France.’
Curie’s humility has not prevented the publication of hundreds of biographies and articles. What distinguishes the latest is today's imperative to tell a wider female story. As Sobel puts it: ‘How the Glow of Radium Lit a Path for Women in Science’.
Throughout her life Curie blazed a trail for women in science; first via the lessons she gave at the École Normale Supérieure de Jeune Filles de Sevres, then by encouraging a host of bright young female physicists from as far as Canada, Norway, Sweden, Hungary, England, Poland and elsewhere. By the 1930s her Radium Institute contained over 30 women.
But when the young Polish Marya Skłodowska (later Marie Curie) first reached Paris in 1891 aged 24, her first observation was not about science at all - but freedom. She remarked of the French that ‘its citizens… openly spoke their own language’ - a fact only remarkable to someone from a country under occupation. Her home region at the time was under Russian hegemony and its citizens were not permitted to speak their mother tongue in official settings. The young Skłodowska from an intellectually dissident family had studied in what was called ‘The Flying University’, an underground organization devoted to Polish scholarship.
This is part of the explanation for her steely resolve to obtain academic equality despite the chauvinism of the age. That being said, her biography records how she was supported and mentored by a number of outstanding men. First of these is Gabriel Lippmann (no relation) who secures her first commission to study the magnetic properties of dozens of varieties of steel for the ‘Société d'encouragement pour l'industrie nationale’. He suggests the subject and mentors her for her doctoral dissertation. When the time comes to submit her findings in person to The Academie des Sciences, Lippmann is forced to present in her place because her gender does not permit her to do so.
It is through this early work on magnetism that she is introduced to a physicist from Sceaux, by name of Pierre Curie. Eight years older, Pierre finds in Marya an equal in both science and the appreciation of simple pleasures. On their honeymoon they go bicycling.
When her doctoral dissertation is ready, ‘Rays Emitted by the Compounds of Uranium and Thorium’, in 1898 it has again to be read by Lippmann.
Via their continued joint investigations, not three years after Alfred Nobel’s prize is launched Pierre and Marie become Nobel recipients in 1903 for their joint work on the isolation of radium and polonium. Pierre refuses the award unless his wife is jointly recognised.
Dava Sobel, author of ‘Longitude’ (1995), connects the depredations of Marya Skłodowska’s occupied Poland with the drive to create a ‘dream for her country’; an ambition, you might say, was not fully realised until the post-communism of the 1980s.
My first wife, a psychologist from Warsaw, was also taught in Russian in the 1960s & 70s and described to me how students found it oppressive to learn in the occupier’s tongue and always read in Polish at home. It is a story that connects the experience of oppressed women in occupied nations from Afghanistan to Ukraine studying underground. And like all those driven to escape their country, the young Skłodowska feels guilt about her exile.
Indeed, as Sobel tells it, were it not for the deep love she develops - to her own surprise - with the worthy, high-minded, Pierre Curie, she might well have returned home. Her fortunate partnership with Pierre can be said to have changed the course of science as well as women’s recognition in it.
Not a public speaker or disposed to tell science in a popular manner it is comical to read that Curie, when giving public lectures, often caused her listeners to make for the exit, leaving only committed chemists and physicists in the hall.
Dava Sobel, while aiming in her book at the popular science market, is no slouch in explaining the science behind such concepts as how to measure elemental decay via alpha and beta emanations, while describing the behaviour of gamma rays, and the transmutation over time of uranium via its many daughter products ultimately into lead (and why); the painstaking means by which the chloride within radium chloride is parted to isolate radium for the first time, how the pitchblendes (uranium ores) containing precious radium are obtained with such difficulty from tailings at the Joachimstahl Mine in Bohemia, and how Polonium’s proclivity to decay at such a fast rate blocks her ability to isolate it.
And yet this is also the woman who writes of motherhood upon hearing her child cry ‘I am not a stoic, I carry her in my arms until she grows quiet’.
At the heart of the book is the love story of the union of minds and deep respect between Marie and Pierre that allows the pair to change the world of chemistry, physics and the Mendeleev table by recognizing that the emission of alpha and beta rays is the cause of the decay of atoms; that elements are not (as Mendeleev thought) immutably defined by atomic weight, but replete with isotopes (radium has thirty-three) which hint at a deeper definition of the identity of an atom.
As a terrible non-scientist, who feels at this juncture his life decaying at the rate of a polonium atom, I can only convey my excitement at reading Dava Sobel’s accounts of Curie and her colleagues' physics experiments which for a few seconds makes even this writer think he might have understood some of the world-changing concepts she discovered.
If you are tempted to read just one book of popular science this coming year, I would recommend this one.
By Anthony Lipmann
January 2025
A version of this article was first published on www.lord-copper.com
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