Marie Curie And The Women Scientists Who Became Her Legacy

A new book looks at the life of Marie Curie through the lens of some of the 45 women who passed through her laboratory.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:03Speaker 00

  If you ask people to name a woman scientist, chances are they'll say Marie Curie.

• 0:09Speaker 01

  She was really a beacon. She was the only woman in the world with that kind of position. Head of a laboratory, professor on a science faculty.

• 0:20Speaker 00

  It's Wednesday, December 11th, and you're listening to Science Friday. I'm sci fi producer Charles Burquist. You've heard about the search for radium, but what about Marie Curie's role as a mentor? This episode, author Davis Sobel joins Ira to talk about what most people don't know about the famous physicist, the dozens of women students and colleagues who flock to her lab. Sobel's new book is The Elements of Marie Curie: How the Glow of Radium Lit a Path for Women in Science. Here's Ira with Davis Sobel.

• 0:54Ira Flatow?

  The book is The Elements of Marie Curie: How the Glow of Radium Lit a Path for Women in Science. I am delighted to welcome back Davis Sobel. Welcome back.

• 1:05Speaker 01

  Oh, thank you, Ira. I'm so happy to talk to you.

• 1:08Ira Flatow?

  It's been too long. Let's get right into this because there's so much to talk about. I love this book, so let's talk about her being one of the most well-known figures in science. Why did you decide to write more about her?

• 1:21Speaker 01

  Yes, she is the most famous woman in the history of science, but she was never the only one, and that's the point. I decided to write about her when I learned about the 45 women who passed through the lab. That was something that I was sure no one knew about Madame Curie. And it felt like the right story for me in my very late coming to awareness of women's issues in science.

• 1:55Ira Flatow?

  You write that "the fact of her womanhood threatened her further advancement. Given the popular perceptions of women's place in society, it was easy for people to see Marie as merely Pierre's wife, a dutiful assistant who made no independent discoveries."

• 2:14Speaker 01

  Yes, and she still suffers from that conclusion in some quarters today.

• 2:20Ira Flatow?

  Yeah, but recognition eventually did come and she used her fame, right, to help other women scientists to rise up. Your book says Curie on the cover, I mean, but it's so much more about all the women scientists who she met and who worked with her lab. I view her as like being the promised land for women.

• 2:39Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 2:39Ira Flatow?

  As students and colleagues, right? How did they all meet? Did she go after them? Did they find her?

• 2:45Speaker 01

  They found her because she got famous pretty early. In 1903, she and Pierre shared a Nobel Prize in Physics. So she was the first woman to win a Nobel Prize. And the fact that she was a woman scientist caught a lot of attention. And she really achieved world fame at that point in 1903. And then Pierre died in 1906. And against all odds and all traditions, she was allowed to take over the lab where they had worked

• 3:22Speaker 01

  together and also to step into his teaching position at the University of Paris. So now she was really a beacon. She was the only woman in the world with that kind of position, head of a laboratory, professor on a science faculty. So the women came to her. There's no evidence that she set out to make a place for women. But on the other hand, she didn't turn them away.

• 3:53Ira Flatow?

  And after they worked with her, did they go on to do great things of their own?

• 3:59Speaker 01

  Some of them did. Some of them went back to be the first female professors in their own countries, including the Netherlands, Hungary, Norway. So they really, they came from all over the world. Not very much is known about many of them, which was a problem writing this book. Marie Curie did not have a secretary for a number of years. And so there were very scarce records kept about who came and who went. But there's, there's enough to name forty five people. And of those forty five, maybe twenty have a, a rich record.

• 4:43Speaker 01

  And, and a few of them didn't go on in science. The first one who came to her, Harriet Brooks, who came from Canada, actually left the lab and got married. And not only didn't continue her career, but tried to make a case that women were ill-suited for science.

• 5:04Ira Flatow?

  Yeah, you say that. I was gonna bring that up because I'm, let me quote from the book. Harriet Brooks says, "The combination of the ability to think in mathematical formulas and to manipulate skillfully the whimsical instruments," I'm gonna try to get this right, "physical laboratory, a combination necessary to attain eminence in physics," she writes, "is apparently one seldom met in women." Why was she so different from everyone else?

• 5:33Speaker 01

  I think she was trying to salve her own conscience. Having left, having been a pioneer in radioactivity, she worked not only for Madame Curie. She worked for a while for J.J. Thompson at the Cavendish in England and for Ernest Rutherford. So she was with all the greats. And she had great abilities, so she was being offered fellowships to continue. But she chose to get married. And I, I think she may have felt some guilt about that and so turned things around. That's just a guess, though. I, I don't claim that in the book.

• 6:16Ira Flatow?

  I was startled to learn that her career began in studying magnetism, nothing to do with radioactivity.

• 6:24Speaker 01

  Right. So there she was, a physics student at the Sorbonne. And one of her professors got her an outside paying gig to do a study for the French steel industry, trying to figure out which type of steel would make the best magnets. And it was in the course of doing that work that she met Pierre. Someone introduced them because magnetism was an interest of his and he had studied it pretty extensively. And I love the fact that the French word for magnet is aimant, my French accent is terrible, A I M A N T, which also means lover.

• 7:09Ira Flatow?

  Oh kidding.

• 7:11Speaker 01

  So the magnetism brought them together.

• 7:14Ira Flatow?

  From your stories you tell, she was seen differently in France, right? Was it odd that Curie was accepted into all the major science organizations in other countries

• 7:26Ira Flatow?

  almost immediately, but not France?

• 7:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, they never accepted her in the Academy of Sciences. And I think that's more of an embarrassment for the Academy now than it was for her.

• 7:40Ira Flatow?

  Was it a cultural difference? I mean...

• 7:42Speaker 01

  It was immutable tradition that they not, they had no women in any of the academies. So this was seen as a breach of tradition. And they even said that. But she had a lot of supporters in the scientific community who were very outspoken in her favor, but they didn't have enough votes to get her in. And election of new members came up only when a previous member in that field of science died. So it wasn't as though she was going to have another opportunity the next year.

• 8:20Ira Flatow?

  Was she viewed any more favorably in the US?

• 8:24Speaker 01

  Oh, yes. Oh, she was a member of several important organizations, including the American Philosophical Society. And then people in America raised money for her to buy more radium for her lab. And she came to this country twice to accept those gifts. And in each case, received the gift from the President of the United States. So that was about as high an honor as one could expect.

• 8:55Ira Flatow?

  Yeah, you're right. On the day after Christmas in 1898, Henri Becquerel informed the Academy des Sciences, I'm not going to pronounce it in French, informed the Academy of Sciences of the discovery of radium. Although Becquerel shared the Curie's excitement, the news of the new element elicited little response outside a small circle of physicists. Why was that?

• 9:20Speaker 01

  People were really interested in X-rays. So the discovery of X-rays happened toward the end of 1895, and it was a giant phenomenon. I forget, I think there were a thousand papers published on X-rays over the next year or two. And then Becquerel found these uranic rays a few months later. And he really couldn't get anybody interested in them. But Marie Curie chose them as her dissertation topic. And from her point of view, it was a good thing that other people weren't interested. She wouldn't have any competition. And while working on it,

• 10:04Speaker 01

  Becquerel showed that anything containing uranium emitted these mysterious rays. And the first thing she did was to test every other element to see if any of them emitted the same kind of rays. And she found that thorium did. So she started calling them Becquerel rays instead of uranic rays. But then she started testing various ores, and she found something else that was far more active. And she immediately guessed that there was another unknown element that was also radioactive, that was her term.

• 10:46Speaker 01

  And she was going to take this ore apart and find this other element.

• 10:54Ira Flatow?

  You know, we look back on her work today with the power of everything we know now about the atom, radiation, the periodic table. But it's amazing that a lot of this research was working under a very different set of assumptions, like they didn't even know about protons and neutrons.

• 11:11Speaker 01

  Right.

• 11:11Ira Flatow?

  Right? And they're doing all this based on atomic weight.

• 11:15Speaker 01

  Right.

• 11:16Ira Flatow?

  That's, that's mind blowing stuff.

• 11:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, and you mentioned atomic weight. So today, if you look that up, you'll get the definition, well, it's the number of protons plus the number of neutrons. But they didn't know about the components of the atom at the beginning. She was in on all those discoveries. And radioactivity was, was one of the phenomena that helped people see inside the atom.

• 11:43Ira Flatow?

  There are so many great details and surprising moments of the book that are like little nuggets, like I'm going across, I'm reading and I see a picture of Marie on a camping trip and I read the text underneath it, it shows all these people, Marie is here and then in the background it says Albert Einstein.

• 12:00Speaker 01

  Right. They were hiking together in the mountains.

• 12:03Ira Flatow?

  Yeah. How did you discover that?

• 12:07Speaker 01

  Well, she was part of this elite group of physicists that were first called together in 1911, was called the Salve Council. And this rich industrial chemist, Ernest Salve, who could afford to invite the top scientists in the world to come together in a room and talk about the most exciting developments. And he handpicked them, or he had people handpicked them. And she was the only woman in that room from 1911 till 1933. They met about every three years. So at the first meeting, there was Albert Einstein, one of the other handpicked scientists. And they liked each other right away.

• 12:52Ira Flatow?

  And so he was a supporter of her?

• 12:54Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 12:56Ira Flatow?

  I imagine an important supporter.

• 12:58Speaker 01

  Yes, especially when she was accused of having an affair and the press just chewed her up.

• 13:07Ira Flatow?

  Yeah, you go into detail on that. I don't think anybody really knew that, the depth of that affair and what it did to her.

• 13:13Speaker 01

  To her, yeah. This was five years after Pierre's death. Her partner in the affair was Paul Longevan, another physicist, a very good friend of both Marie and Pierre's. And he had been crying on her shoulder about his unhappy marriage. And I think she thought he was really going to leave the marriage and that she would have another marriage like she had with Pierre, where they were not only very much in love, but they worked together and talked about physics together. But he did not leave his wife. And the press labeled

• 13:56Speaker 01

  her a foreigner, a homewrecker. It was pretty ugly.

• 14:02Speaker 00

  After the break, Curie's role in medicine and how Deva Sobel researched this book.

• 14:13Speaker 03

  WNYC is supported by Bear. Every day in America, science delivers, not just in the headlines, but in the moments that matter most. Science is a journey, one of curiosity, persistence, and progress. It's about asking questions, testing, learning, and improving again and again. Science delivers harvests that feed families, tools that help farmers grow more with less, and new ways to protect land for generations to come. Let's keep asking, keep testing, keep discovering, so science can keep delivering. Learn more at sciencedelivers.com.

• 14:48Speaker 04

  I'm Kevin Ruess.

• 14:48Speaker 05

  And I'm Casey Newton.

• 14:49Speaker 04

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• 15:00Speaker 05

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  Listen to Machine Gods from NPR on the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 15:17Ira Flatow?

  There are so many great details that people don't know about. Her role in the war effort, she, you know, she was in the war, right?

• 15:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think that's my favorite thing about her. That as soon as World War I began, she realized that this was the first time it would be possible to X-ray wounded soldiers. And she immediately got someone to give her a car, even though she didn't know how to drive. And she outfitted it with X-ray equipment and convinced the army to let her drive to field hospitals and even to the front eventually. And she outfitted about 18 or 19 of those mobile X-ray units. And she trained 150 French women to be X-ray technicians.

• 16:09Ira Flatow?

  Wow. And you write, of course, about the unknown dangers of working with radioactive materials. She and others often found, and I'll quote the book, "The palms of their hands flaked and peeled in response to handling radioactive products, and the tips of their fingers hardened painfully for weeks or months at a time. These discomforts did not worry them or deter them from pursuing their science. In fact, the reported skin lesions aroused the interest of medical doctors."

• 16:38Speaker 01

  Yes, and radium very quickly became the cure for cancer. And it held that position for about two decades, which is one of the reasons she's regarded as a great humanitarian.

• 16:53Ira Flatow?

  How were you able to do research on this book? All through COVID? It sounds almost impossible.

• 17:00Speaker 01

  Well, COVID, of course, kept me from going to Paris, just as it kept everybody from going anywhere. And very fortunately for me, the archives on Madame Curie have been digitized. So you can go on the website of the French National Library and read even the most personal documents, including the Journal of Her Grief that she kept for a year after Pierre's death, the notebooks in which she recorded the developmental milestones of her two children.

• 17:37Speaker 01

  Everything is there. So I had a wealth of material. And fortunately, I had been to Paris for other reasons at other times and to Warsaw. So I had a sense of the places where she was. And what can I say? I was highly motivated.

• 17:56Ira Flatow?

  Did you find actual, original handwritten notes from her?

• 17:59Speaker 01

  Yes. Oh, yes. The whole grief journal is handwritten. There are drafts of her letters with her corrections. And I only just a week ago saw actual letters that she had handwritten. I happened to be visiting the American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia. And the librarian there had looked for any materials about her that they might have. And there were two letters, fully handwritten letters. I did suggest that they have someone go over those documents with a Geiger counter. But it was such a thrill for me after seeing everything on a screen. And then there they were, on pieces of paper.

• 18:44Ira Flatow?

  Wow. Deva, it's a terrific book. Would make a great holiday gift, I think, to anybody who's interested in history or science. Thank you for taking time to be with us today.

• 18:55Speaker 01

  Thank you for inviting me.

• 18:56Ira Flatow?

  Davis Sobel, author of "The Elements of Marie Curie: How the Glow of Radium Lit a Path for Women in Science."

• 19:06Speaker 00

  That's it for today. Tomorrow, how your friend's microbiome can affect yours and how that might affect your health. Lots of folks help make this show happen, including

• 19:16Speaker 06

  Emma Gomez. Annie Nero. George Harper.

• 19:19Speaker 00

  Kathleen Davis. And many more. I'm Sci-Fi Producer Charles Burquist. Thanks so much for listening. We'll see you soon.