Pod Insights StarTalk Podcast The Elements of Marie Curie with Dava Sobel About this episode How did Marie Curie’s discoveries in radioactivity change our understanding of the natural world? Neil deGrasse Tyson and comedian Chuck Nice sit down with science writer Dava Sobel, author of a new book on Curie, to explore the enduring impact of her work on radioactivity.
Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:00 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So Chuck, I love having guests come back. Why? Is it so rare? No, no. It so rarely happens. They run away and never return? No, no, no. It's Davis Sobel. Yeah. Is a fixture on the landscape of science writing and has gone places that others haven't or haven't even thought to go. Well, she took us there, so it was just tremendous. Just tremendous, especially since she was our first ever guest. Wow. Season one, episode one of StarTalk, a bajillion years ago. Coming up, Davis Sobel.
0:33 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Welcome to StarTalk, your place in the universe where science and pop culture collide.
0:42 Neil deGrasse Tyson? StarTalk begins right now.
0:47 Neil deGrasse Tyson? This is StarTalk. Neil deGrasse Tyson here, your personal astrophysicist. Got Chuck Nice with me, Chuck, your baby. Hey, Neil. Yeah, so guess who we have as a guest today? A very special guest? Let me tell you how special. Beyond special. Beyond special. Okay. Let me tell you how beyond special this person is right here. Can you see it right here? Can we see all the cameras get that? Okay. There we go. David, welcome back to StarTalk. This person, sitting to my left, our record show, was our very first guest, season one, episode one of StarTalk. Wow. Whoa. Davis Sobel, we're unworthy. We're not worthy. You were there at the beginning.
1:32 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Oh, my gosh. We call that telescopes that rocked our world. And, yeah. And back then, it was only audio, so we didn't, nope, that's all we had.
1:44 Speaker 01 Okay, well, here we are.
1:46 Neil deGrasse Tyson? That's like prehistory. So you're a science writer, but you cut your teeth as a journalist for, was it Gannett Papers in Long Island? What was it?
1:55 Speaker 01 Oh, it was in upstate New York when I worked for them. And
2:00 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Them is Gannett and Gannett is everywhere.
2:01 Speaker 01 Was right. It was the Binghamton Evening in Sunday Press.
2:05 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Binghamton? Wow, okay. Binghamton town in New York, uh, New York.
2:09 Speaker 01 And there was IBM there. I was briefly, very briefly, a technical writer for IBM.
2:15 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Okay, so you had some science chops early.
2:18 Speaker 01 Yeah.
2:18 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Okay.
2:19 Speaker 01 I went to your high school, too.
2:21 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Graduate of the Bronx High School of Science. Whoa. Uh-oh. Oh, that's serious bona fides, as they say. Okay, so you already had a science baptism, becoming a journalist.
2:32 Speaker 01 Yeah, yeah.
2:32 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Wow.
2:33 Speaker 01 Yeah. And I didn't even know it was called science writing. And I wish somebody had told me about it sooner, because it would have made my journey a lot more direct. I was just, just a lost soul for a long time.
2:49 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Oh.
2:49 Speaker 01 But I'm happy now.
2:51 Neil deGrasse Tyson? You've been found. Saved by science. Saved by science. I think most people came to know you through your, I don't know if it's your first book, but the first book that did really, really well, of course, and that was, uh, the chronometer story.
3:07 Speaker 01 Longitude.
3:07 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Longitude, yes. Uh, the story, the subtitle. You know, if you, if you read the title and the subtitle of this book, you say, I ain't buying that. Who's gonna be care-
3:15 Speaker 01 Exactly. I didn't think anybody would buy it.
3:17 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Yeah, buy me the subtitle. What was it?
3:20 Speaker 01 The true story of a lone genius who solved the greatest scientific problem of his time.
3:25 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Oh, no, I'm buying that book. Wait, wait, wait. Are you kidding me? That's, that's like a scientific telenovela. Well, I know, but, but it's titled Longitude.
3:33 Speaker 01 Longitude.
3:34 Neil deGrasse Tyson? That's what I'm saying. You might have lost me there. That's what I'm saying.
3:36 Speaker 01 And people still ask me, what's it about, really?
3:41 Neil deGrasse Tyson? That's hilarious. And you wouldn't utter the man's name, because no one heard of him, but Harrison?
3:46 Speaker 01 John Harrison.
3:47 Neil deGrasse Tyson? John Harrison, who invented the first seaworthy chronometer, which was a runaway mega bestseller, okay? Right. And another one, uh, Galileo's daughter.
3:56 Speaker 01 Mm-hmm.
3:57 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Yes, whose name was?
3:59 Speaker 01 Well, she was Virginia.
4:01 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Oh.
4:02 Speaker 01 But then she became Swor Maria Celeste.
4:05 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Celeste.
4:06 Speaker 01 When she Celeste.
4:08 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Celeste, yeah, that's the sky, right there. Okay, okay. And then there was the glass ceiling.
4:14 Speaker 01 Actually, it was called the glass universe.
4:16 Neil deGrasse Tyson? The glass uni-
4:18 Speaker 01 But you know, even my editor called it the glass ceiling all the time.
4:22 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Yeah, so that one was, that was a good one. Uh, let me just declare that my people are pretty well informed about that part of our own history in astronomy. There's a whole community of women at the Harvard College Observatory, but we knew that this story was not told beyond our own retelling among ourselves. And this was an important exposition of the role that women played in early science and in particularly early astronomy. Yeah, the glass.
4:52 Chuck Nice? Glass universe.
4:54 Neil deGrasse Tyson? And what was the subtitle on that one?
4:56 Speaker 01 How the latest of the Harvard Observatory took the measure of the stars.
5:00 Chuck Nice? Ooh, wow. You make great titles.
5:04 Speaker 01 Thank you.
5:07 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So, uh, we've got you here and now, cause you have yet another book.
5:11 Speaker 01 Yep.
5:11 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Just setting the record straight.
5:12 Chuck Nice? Okay.
5:13 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Just let's do it. Uh, Marie Curie.
5:16 Chuck Nice? Ooh, okay. How everyone don't-
5:19 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Wait, wait, wait, okay. I'm not gonna read the subtitle, cause I want you to compliment her on the yet another subtitle.
5:24 Chuck Nice? Okay.
5:24 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Here it goes.
5:25 Chuck Nice? Go ahead.
5:25 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Give it to us. Marie Curie.
5:26 Speaker 01 How the glow of radium lit a path for women in science.
5:31 Chuck Nice? Oh, so you're just showing off now. You're just showing off.
5:36 Neil deGrasse Tyson? The glow of radium.
5:38 Chuck Nice? The glow of radium. That's pretty wild, yeah. And, and how, like, I see what you did there too, cause she, right, didn't she discover radium?
5:47 Speaker 01 She did.
5:48 Chuck Nice? Right?
5:48 Speaker 01 Yeah.
5:48 Chuck Nice? She discovered radium and was it polonium?
5:50 Neil deGrasse Tyson? We'll get the whole-
5:51 Chuck Nice? Oh, I'm sorry.
5:51 Neil deGrasse Tyson? We'll go get the whole thing.
5:52 Chuck Nice? I'm just trying to remember my-
5:53 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Oh, you remember polonium? Oh my god, thoughts about polonium?
5:55 Chuck Nice? That was another one that she discovered.
5:56 Speaker 01 Yeah, that was actually the first one.
5:57 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Yeah, and so we can't name them all, you know.
6:00 Chuck Nice? Right.
6:01 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Curium.
6:03 Speaker 01 She didn't name any of them curium, that came later.
6:06 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Yeah, and the first radioactive element was radium.
6:11 Speaker 01 Well, uranium was the first one.
6:13 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Oh, sure, sure, but what she worked with.
6:15 Speaker 01 She discovered, the first one was polonium.
6:17 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So, how many elements did she discover?
6:20 Speaker 01 Two. Which two? Polonium and radium.
6:23 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Okay. All right, and later on, we would name an element in her honor, curium. Gotcha. So, how did Marie Curie land in your lap?
6:32 Speaker 01 I had a, almost a religious experience in the course of writing The Glass Universe. Because the story was all about women. And over and over, I kept finding myself surprised by what they had done. And I finally had to admit that I had embarrassingly low expectations of them. And even though I'm a woman, my mother was a scientist, I had all these reasons.
7:06 Neil deGrasse Tyson? True.
7:07 Speaker 01 I had all of these reasons to be more respectful. I had just picked up the negative attitudes about women that were in the air in the nineteen-
7:21 Neil deGrasse Tyson? You had a man bias.
7:23 Speaker 01 I definitely did. And so, it stunned me. And then I had, I had several astronomers fact-check that book, and one of them was Alyssa Goodman at Harvard. And she apologized right away. She said, "I'm not really focusing on your descriptions of astrophysics because I'm so gobsmacked by these women. Here I am at Harvard, I know all their names, but I always thought it was something cute or quaint. I never realized they were doing science." So this kind of misogyny, these low opinions of women in science are very widespread,
8:07 Speaker 01 very insidious. And that made me want to tell more stories about women in science. So my editor immediately suggested Marie Curie. And I said, no, because everybody knows about her, and I don't have anything new to say about her. So I wouldn't want to just regurgitate facts. But then, I was asked to review a book called Women and Their Element. And it was all about women chemists, more than 30 of them. And in reading the profiles of these women, six or seven of them had a direct connection to Marie Curie.
8:52 Speaker 01 And that was interesting. It was like a little network. So I got in touch with the Curie Museum in Paris, and they had records. There were about 45 women who worked for her. So this was something I knew that nobody knew about Madame Curie.
9:13 Chuck Nice? She was like the Harpo Studios of science before Oprah.
9:18 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So they gave you access to these records?
9:21 Speaker 01 Not just then. They actually had a book published, little sketches of the women in alphabetical order with some biographical details and references to the papers they had written.
9:38 Neil deGrasse Tyson? This is the stable of other women working in Marie Curie's laboratory?
9:43 Speaker 01 Right.
9:43 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Forty-five women?
9:44 Chuck Nice? Forty-five. That's phenomenal.
9:47 Neil deGrasse Tyson? How does it even get to that number?
9:50 Speaker 01 Because of the position she was in. So she and her husband shared a Nobel Prize in 1903, and then he was killed in an accident. And she took over the laboratory and his teaching position.
10:04 Neil deGrasse Tyson? By the way, his name is Curie.
10:06 Speaker 01 Yes. Her name was Sklodowska.
10:09 Chuck Nice? Sklodowska.
10:10 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Yes, so she's Polish, though we think of her as...
10:13 Speaker 01 Think of her as French.
10:15 Chuck Nice? As French, right. Because of Madame Curie, of course.
10:19 Speaker 01 She had to go to Paris to go to university.
10:22 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Why?
10:23 Speaker 01 Because in Warsaw, where she was born, women were not allowed to attend university.
10:29 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Wow.
10:30 Speaker 01 Yeah, yeah.
10:31 Neil deGrasse Tyson? And we're not talking about the 1600s here.
10:33 Speaker 01 No, no, we're talking about the late 1800s. Yeah, yeah. First woman ever to teach at the University of Paris.
10:42 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Wow.
10:43 Speaker 01 So now she is really a phenomenon and a magnet for women scientists.
10:50 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Oh, of course.
10:51 Chuck Nice? Oh, cool, yeah. And... All the other women in Poland who weren't allowed to go to school.
10:55 Speaker 01 Some of those.
10:55 Chuck Nice? They were like, we're headed to Paris to study under Marie.
10:58 Speaker 01 Norway.
10:59 Neil deGrasse Tyson? I didn't want to undervalue the value of her visibility.
11:06 Speaker 01 Yes.
11:06 Neil deGrasse Tyson? And the ambitions of others. Oh, my gosh.
11:09 Speaker 01 Whereas I think women have always been interested in science, found ways to participate in science. She was the first one who really was in charge of a laboratory and a professorship.
11:37 Speaker 03 I'm Kais from Bangladesh and I support StarTalk on Patreon. This is StarTalk with Neil deGrasse Tyson.
11:55 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Okay, so today, most people, when asked, "Name a famous female scientist", the only scientist they can name is Marie Curie.
12:03 Speaker 01 That is the sad truth.
12:04 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Okay, so you're not helping that matter because you just published a book on Marie Curie.
12:07 Speaker 01 Guilty as charged.
12:10 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So maybe the rest of these women, are there stories that can be highlighted among them?
12:14 Speaker 01 Yes.
12:15 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Oh, well.
12:17 Speaker 01 Yes.
12:17 Neil deGrasse Tyson? And that's also part of the book?
12:19 Speaker 01 That is what the book is about.
12:20 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Oh.
12:21 Speaker 01 It's about all these other women.
12:23 Neil deGrasse Tyson? It's a big buffalo legacy.
12:24 Speaker 01 Yeah. And it was during her lifetime. They came because of her. And then she collaborated with them, published with them. She taught a course, so she was... Inspiring students in that class. Even before she taught at the university, she had taught at a teacher training school for women. And she taught physics.
12:51 Chuck Nice? Wow.
12:52 Speaker 01 That was her, that was her field. So she shared the Nobel Prize in Physics with Pierre. But then
12:59 Neil deGrasse Tyson? 1903.
13:00 Speaker 01 In 1903. But then in 1911, they awarded her, the Nobel Committee awarded her the Nobel Prize in Chemistry.
13:09 Chuck Nice? Wow.
13:10 Speaker 01 And she alone. So she didn't share it with anyone.
13:14 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Yeah, most Nobel Prizes are shared.
13:15 Chuck Nice? Thank, thank goodness that she did that. Because, and I mean, I hate to be cynical, but if you share a Nobel Prize
13:25 Neil deGrasse Tyson? With your husband.
13:26 Chuck Nice? With a husband, you also share his name.
13:30 Neil deGrasse Tyson? And you have his name, right.
13:32 Chuck Nice? People are going to automatically fall into the bias of, well, clearly she was his assistant.
13:40 Speaker 01 He did.
13:40 Chuck Nice? He did the work.
13:41 Speaker 01 That happened. Even though she won a second Nobel Prize.
13:47 Speaker 01 It's really rough for women, let me tell you.
13:49 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Yeah, that's tough.
13:50 Chuck Nice? That's why I was glad she won a second one. So to erase any stigma that might have been attached.
13:55 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Second one outright.
13:56 Chuck Nice? Yeah, this is all her.
13:58 Speaker 01 No, it's still, it's still got said that she was just his assistant.
14:04 Chuck Nice? Oh, man.
14:05 Speaker 01 And the reason they took on that work, it was her dissertation project. When it got really interesting, Pierre quit what he was doing to work with her.
14:17 Chuck Nice? Just like a man, okay?
14:20 Speaker 01 I didn't say that.
14:22 Chuck Nice? No, I'm saying it.
14:23 Speaker 01 But she had a good friend, a British physicist, Hertha Ayrton, who was also married to a physicist. And they intentionally worked on different things. Just so
14:36 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Just to manage.
14:37 Speaker 01 That no one could say that Hertha was her husband's assistant.
14:40 Chuck Nice? The assistant.
14:41 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So highlight some of the science that came out of her lab and her, and her brilliance.
14:47 Speaker 01 Well, radioactivity, which was her word, was a new phenomenon. And that's why she got interested in it. So X-rays were discovered in 1895. And that was a huge interest.
15:04 Speaker 01 A thousand papers on X-rays got published.
15:08 Neil deGrasse Tyson? That got the first Nobel Prize in Physics.
15:09 Speaker 01 Yes.
15:10 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Wilhelm Röntgen in 1900.
15:12 Chuck Nice? Okay.
15:13 Neil deGrasse Tyson? The discovery of X-rays.
15:14 Chuck Nice? What an unfortunate name, but.
15:15 Neil deGrasse Tyson? What Wilhelm?
15:16 Chuck Nice? Wilhelm Röntgen.
15:18 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Röntgen. In fact, we're the only ones who call them X-rays. Everybody else calls them Röntgen rays.
15:22 Speaker 01 Rankin rays, right.
15:23 Chuck Nice? What?
15:23 Neil deGrasse Tyson? You didn't know that?
15:24 Chuck Nice? No, I did not. I'm sorry. We got your Rankins back.
15:28 Chuck Nice? And it appears that your wrist is fractured. Yeah, that's not, that doesn't work for me, you know? We got your X-rays. I don't know. It just sounds great.
15:36 Neil deGrasse Tyson? What did Wilhelm call them?
15:37 Speaker 01 He called them X-rays.
15:38 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Well, then, we're good here. We're good here.
15:41 Speaker 01 So the very next year, Becquerel in France.
15:45 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Oh, oui.
15:46 Speaker 01 Henri Becquerel.
15:49 Chuck Nice? You know, that's a good name.
15:50 Speaker 01 Multicultural we are.
15:51 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Yeah, that's a good one.
15:52 Chuck Nice? Oh, oui.
15:53 Speaker 01 So he was curious about X-rays and wanted to see if maybe it was an effect of fluorescence or phosphorescence. But he noticed, and he was experimenting with a uranium crystal, and something else was coming out of the uranium that was not X-rays. And he, um,
16:21 Speaker 01 he got very interested in that. He called them uranic rays. And everybody else was so interested in X-rays that nobody picked up on the uranic rays. So Madame Curie, now looking for a thesis topic, thought, that'll be good for me because it's interesting. And her husband was an inventor of instruments and.
16:49 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Scientific instruments.
16:50 Speaker 01 Scientific instruments. And there was a way to measure the strength of these uranic rays.
16:58 Speaker 01 That some of his instruments could pick up. So it just seemed to be perfect for her. And soon she, so she started testing all the elements to see if anything else emitted these uranic rays. And she found out that thorium also did.
17:18 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Name Thor.
17:20 Chuck Nice? You know, the god of the bifrost.
17:24 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Thor.
17:25 Chuck Nice? Thor.
17:25 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Yeah, it was a huge fun history of culture and mythology and people embedded in the periodic table. But go to thorium.
17:33 Speaker 01 And then she was testing some uranium ore and got a reading that was far higher than either uranium or thorium. And so she concluded that there was an unknown element, and as yet undiscovered element, that she could discover on the basis of its radioactivity. That was her word.
17:58 Neil deGrasse Tyson? And did you say that earlier? That whatever, this other ingredient is found with uranium?
18:02 Speaker 01 With uranium, yes.
18:04 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So that's pretty wild. She inferred its existence.
18:07 Speaker 01 Exactly.
18:08 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Because pure uranium wouldn't do that.
18:10 Speaker 01 She'd already tested that. She knew what its strength was. And this was much, much higher. So first she retested everything, make sure she didn't make a mistake. And then she said, there has to be a new element.
18:23 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Wow.
18:23 Speaker 01 And this, this is part of the excitement of this period, that the periodic table was a work in progress.
18:30 Neil deGrasse Tyson? It still is, but there are no gaps, is the point.
18:32 Speaker 01 Right, there are no more gaps.
18:33 Neil deGrasse Tyson? We're still increasing at the high end, making bigger, fatter elements.
18:38 Speaker 01 Like uranium.
18:39 Neil deGrasse Tyson? There's a hypothesized place. Because all these elements are highly unstable. But there's an hypothesized place based on equations of atomic nuclei and their stability. That is called, we think there's an island of stability, just a few more elements down. Where if you make those elements, then they're permanent and they're not, they won't decay. Like all these other elements do. And so there's a hunt now for the island of stability. Yeah, so we're still, we're still working the table. But everything, you're talking about filling in gaps.
19:10 Speaker 01 Filling in the gaps.
19:11 Neil deGrasse Tyson? That were there.
19:12 Speaker 01 Right.
19:12 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Oh, yeah.
19:13 Speaker 01 Right, there were a lot of gaps. And...
19:17 Speaker 01 In the course of breaking down this ore to isolate the new element, she realized there were two different ones. And the first one they identified was polonium, which they named for Poland.
19:32 Chuck Nice? Right.
19:33 Speaker 01 And then...
19:34 Chuck Nice? Because of her.
19:35 Speaker 01 Because of her.
19:35 Chuck Nice? Yes, yeah.
19:36 Speaker 01 Because she was very fiercely Polish.
19:41 Chuck Nice? Yeah.
19:42 Speaker 01 Yeah. And had originally intended to get educated in Paris and then go back to Poland and teach and uplift her country people.
19:54 Chuck Nice? Right.
19:55 Speaker 01 But she fell in love. A colleague of hers thought that he might be helpful to her in her work, and they fell in love. Neither of them expected that, but...
20:05 Chuck Nice? And what was her line?
20:08 Speaker 01 It was, she wrote to one of her family members that, "It's a grief to me."
20:15 Chuck Nice? It's a grief to me.
20:16 Speaker 01 To remain forever in Paris.
20:19 Chuck Nice? But I am deeply in love. Wow.
20:22 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Today, there would just be an emoji.
20:26 Neil deGrasse Tyson? We've lost all ability to communicate.
20:29 Speaker 01 I want to say, she could really write. Her scientific papers are so clear. They are a marvel of clarity.
20:37 Chuck Nice? By the way, my wife would leave me for plane tickets to Paris.
20:47 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Much less a secret lover.
20:52 Chuck Nice? Just the plane ticket. She's like, "Listen, man, I'm sorry this didn't work out."
20:57 Neil deGrasse Tyson? It was good up till now.
20:58 Chuck Nice? Exactly.
20:59 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So I'm delighted we take so much for granted in modern times that the chart of boxes in the front of your chemistry class was complete.
21:07 Speaker 01 Yeah, just been there forever.
21:09 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Like it's just there, endowed by the universe. But no, there's some hard work to make this happen. So tell me, no one understands at the time that radioactivity...
21:21 Neil deGrasse Tyson? will harm healthy tissue. So what, give me some backstory on that.
21:26 Speaker 01 Well, you'd think they would have figured it out right away because they had burns on their hands. And if they carried a vial of the stuff in a pocket, they got a burn on their body. So this immediately drew the attention of medical doctors who saw this material as a treatment for cancer. And for several decades, radium was the cure for cancer.
21:51 Neil deGrasse Tyson? For tumors, you would, you would attack the cells of a tumor.
21:56 Speaker 01 Exactly.
21:56 Chuck Nice? Radiate the cells of the tumor.
21:58 Speaker 01 Exactly.
21:59 Chuck Nice? Wow.
21:59 Neil deGrasse Tyson? How would they do? Would they drop radium into the tumor itself? Or what would they do?
22:03 Speaker 01 It changed over time. So the first two patients, two women with breast cancer, were actually brought into the Curie's laboratory.
22:11 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Wow.
22:12 Speaker 01 And had their.
22:13 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So somebody had to have that thought to even consider this.
22:16 Speaker 01 Right. There was harm associated with it, obviously, but it was doing so much good and it was so interesting.
22:22 Chuck Nice? When did they find out that radioactivity also causes cancer?
22:28 Speaker 01 Well, I think the real big moment was in the 1920s with the, with the dial painters. So these were young women painting the numbers on glow-in-the-dark watches and instruments using paint that actually contained radium.
22:47 Chuck Nice? Right.
22:47 Speaker 01 And they were told to put the paintbrush between their lips to get a nice point.
22:54 Chuck Nice? Nice tip, yes.
22:55 Speaker 01 And it destroyed their jaws and they died.
22:58 Chuck Nice? Oh, my goodness.
22:59 Speaker 01 Yes. Their teeth fell out. Their, yeah, it was horrible.
23:03 Chuck Nice? That's terrible.
23:04 Speaker 01 And of course, Madame Curie never advocated paint.
23:09 Chuck Nice? Right.
23:09 Speaker 01 Full of radium. That was not what she was.
23:13 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Yeah, but think about it. Think of how amazing it is that there's something that's glowing all by itself. Yeah. That must have been just stupefying.
23:20 Speaker 01 Yeah, and that appealed to Marie and Pierre from the beginning, that as they would try to break down this ore and they'd have different dishes of this or that, they didn't know what it was at first. And at night, there would be a glow. But it isn't really the radium, right? Even in the paint, the radium shoots out an alpha particle that excites the other ingredients in the paint, and that's what's glowing.
23:49 Neil deGrasse Tyson? That renders it visible.
23:51 Speaker 01 Yeah.
23:51 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Okay. This is a pivotal moment in the history of science.
23:55 Speaker 01 Absolutely.
23:55 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Physics and chemistry.
23:57 Speaker 01 Yeah.
23:57 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Absolutely. Because it's not just-
23:59 Speaker 01 And it's a moment when physics and chemistry really meet.
24:01 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Meet, and they meet society in a fundamental way. Would you say that the concept of radioactivity and its value to dating things for their age all began with Marie Curie? Is that a fair credit to give?
24:20 Speaker 01 Yes. She wasn't doing that work, but other people in her lab were, including some of the women.
24:26 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Okay. Because if something is radioactive, you have a certain amount of that substance in your sample. If it's radioactive, it's changing identity. It's becoming another element, right? It's very alchemical, isn't it? Ah, look at that. Look at that.
24:41 Speaker 01 Which was a big problem at first.
24:43 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Changing one element into another, is that even possible?
24:45 Speaker 01 Right.
24:46 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Because we'd already given up on alchemy.
24:47 Speaker 01 Exactly.
24:48 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Right? If you know the rate at which it's changing, and you know how much you started with, you'll know how old the sample is. Right. Because how long it's been there. Yeah, and, oh my gosh, how useful that is, especially to geologists. Yeah.
25:02 Speaker 01 Yes, the age of the Earth was determined in the wake of these discoveries.
25:08 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Cool.
25:09 Speaker 01 And it was much older than anybody had thought.
25:12 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Older than 6,000 years?
25:13 Speaker 01 Yeah.
25:16 Neil deGrasse Tyson? You think?
25:17 Chuck Nice? That's so funny.
25:18 Speaker 01 Yeah.
25:18 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Tell me about hers. Her second Nobel Prize. What was she cited for in that? The one in chemistry.
25:24 Speaker 01 Specifically for the discoveries of the new elements and her isolation of radium, which she had only recently managed to do. So these elements existed in such tiny quantities. From a ton of ore, she would get a fraction of a gram.
25:43 Neil deGrasse Tyson? You know how big, how much a gram weighs?
25:44 Chuck Nice? Um, how big is the cracker? No, I don't know. How much is a gram?
25:50 Neil deGrasse Tyson? It's hardly anything. It's one thirtieth of one ounce.
25:55 Chuck Nice? One thirtieth of an ounce?
25:56 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Yes.
25:57 Chuck Nice? Yeah. See, that is information, as a proud American, I will never need.
26:25 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Tell me about her daughter.
26:27 Speaker 01 Oh.
26:27 Neil deGrasse Tyson? What's up with that?
26:28 Speaker 01 So she had, she had two daughters. And the older girl was very much like her father. And Marie always dreamed that she would become a scientist, which she did. And she also won a Nobel Prize in Chemistry.
26:42 Chuck Nice? Wow.
26:42 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Damn, talk about a bloodline, right there.
26:44 Chuck Nice? Yeah.
26:45 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So when was her, the daughter's Nobel Prize?
26:47 Speaker 01 1935.
26:48 Neil deGrasse Tyson? And what she do it for?
26:49 Speaker 01 She and her husband found a way to create...
26:53 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Oh, the husband is in there.
26:54 Speaker 01 There's another husband. She repeated the story. Married the lab partner, worked together.
27:01 Chuck Nice? Wow.
27:01 Speaker 01 And made these tremendous discoveries and shared the Nobel Prize with him.
27:06 Chuck Nice? Look at that. You have become your mother.
27:10 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So what was it, what did she discover?
27:12 Speaker 01 They discovered a way to make artificial radioe elements, which had a big advantage over natural radioactive elements because they would decay to something non radioactive immediately. So they could make safer tracers.
27:30 Chuck Nice? Wow.
27:31 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Very important in medicine.
27:31 Speaker 01 In medicine, exactly. Exactly. Because you don't really want to be using radium to treat your cancer.
27:39 Chuck Nice? That's fascinating.
27:41 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Yeah, because not all elements are created equal.
27:44 Chuck Nice? Oh.
27:44 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Some decay faster than others.
27:46 Chuck Nice? Right.
27:46 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Yeah, so that their lethality or their harm factor drops exponentially.
27:51 Chuck Nice? Yeah.
27:51 Neil deGrasse Tyson? From when you needed it at its, at its peak.
27:54 Chuck Nice? Right.
27:55 Neil deGrasse Tyson? And so, yeah, in fact, depending on how long you need the treatment, they just pull one off the shelf that has the right radioactive profile.
28:02 Chuck Nice? Absolutely.
28:03 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Right.
28:03 Chuck Nice? Yeah.
28:03 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Right. So she's creating the ideas and the foundations for whatever medical instruments would later be built.
28:12 Chuck Nice? Wow.
28:13 Neil deGrasse Tyson? In the service of human health.
28:14 Chuck Nice? So the people who got the Nobel Prize for those discoveries, basically she would call them and go, "You're welcome."
28:26 Speaker 01 How science builds on itself.
28:28 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Yes, yes.
28:29 Speaker 01 Did you want to talk about the love affair?
28:31 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So by the time of her second Nobel Prize, her husband's gone.
28:35 Chuck Nice? He's deceased.
28:35 Speaker 01 He was, yes, five, five years.
28:38 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Gone. And from what I understand, there was some highly written about in the media, affair between her and a married man? Is that, do I remembering this correctly?
28:50 Speaker 01 Yes.
28:51 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Okay. And today, I don't know how important that would be to anybody. So in the late aughts, okay, early 1910s, that information is received differently. Now, she's a celebrity, so everyone is going to care about her sex life. Okay, because that's, right?
29:08 Chuck Nice? That's what we do.
29:09 Neil deGrasse Tyson? That's, that's how that goes. So did this matter to the Nobel Committee? Were they?
29:16 Speaker 01 It mattered to everyone. She was vilified, she was called a home wrecker and a foreigner because he was a married man with children. So word of this got out, and it got out in the wake of a highly important physics meeting where only the top physicists in the world were invited to attend. She was there, she was the only woman in the room. And they come out, Albert Einstein was there, Ernest Rutherford, a few people you've heard of.
29:45 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Rutherford discovered the nucleus of the atom. These are, these are some heavy hitters.
29:50 Chuck Nice? Heavy.
29:50 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Yeah.
29:51 Chuck Nice? Big time.
29:51 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So she's vilified and the cheating husband is not vilified.
29:55 Speaker 01 Right. Right, he's a victim.
29:58 Chuck Nice? Oh, he's a victim.
29:59 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Oh.
30:00 Chuck Nice? So they, uh...
30:02 Neil deGrasse Tyson? It's the, it's the harlot scientist.
30:03 Chuck Nice? Of course.
30:04 Speaker 01 You know, she's a foreigner and she, she's, she had recently tried to gain election to the Academy of Sciences.
30:14 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So that people got jingoistic, she's a foreigner.
30:17 Chuck Nice? Right.
30:18 Neil deGrasse Tyson? She's, she's a homewrecker. A man married with kids.
30:22 Chuck Nice? Right.
30:22 Neil deGrasse Tyson? And...
30:23 Chuck Nice? He's a victim.
30:24 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So what happened at the meeting and then what happened with the Nobel Committee?
30:27 Speaker 01 Well, the meeting was already over and Einstein wrote to her outraged that she had been pinpointed this way and said, he, he's sorry that the rabble was concerning itself and he thought very highly of her.
30:45 Chuck Nice? Yeah. That sounds, see, that's great because his deal is, what does any of this have to do with science?
30:50 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Right.
30:51 Speaker 01 The Nobel Committee decided that maybe it would not be a good idea for her to come to Stockholm to accept the prize in the midst of this scandal.
31:00 Neil deGrasse Tyson? But would, would they have given her the prize even if he didn't show up?
31:05 Speaker 01 I think so, but I'm, I can't...
31:07 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So they just didn't want the media circus?
31:08 Chuck Nice? They didn't want the optics.
31:08 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Yeah, just the whole...
31:10 Chuck Nice? Right.
31:11 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Or the circus that would unfold.
31:12 Chuck Nice? Right.
31:13 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Because they wouldn't be asking about, that would, that would change the mood of the, of the ceremony.
31:18 Speaker 01 The ceremony, but at that, and she had offered at first not to come. And they told her, no, no one here believes the lies, but then they changed their minds and asked her not to come. And she said, "I fail to see any connection between my scientific work and scandalous attacks on my private life."
31:40 Chuck Nice? It's a...
31:41 Speaker 01 And she went to Stockholm.
31:42 Chuck Nice? However, I will say that the illicit sex that I've had with my lab partner is indeed radioactive. Oh, stop, shut up.
31:53 Speaker 01 No comment.
31:56 Neil deGrasse Tyson? There's a novel inside Chuck somewhere.
31:59 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Get that out. So, so she went and got the, got the prize.
32:01 Speaker 01 She got the prize, yeah, and she took her daughter with her. So Iran got to, got a foretaste of, of, of her.
32:11 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Hey, I'm gonna think I'm gonna come by here in 20 years.
32:13 Speaker 01 I'm gonna come back, yeah.
32:15 Neil deGrasse Tyson? 25 years, I'll be back. I'll be back. Watch me. So your book, who published the book?
32:21 Speaker 01 Grove Atlantic Monthly Press.
32:23 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Oh, okay. And, and it's out now?
32:27 Speaker 01 It is.
32:27 Neil deGrasse Tyson? It is out now. All right, so is this a movie ready, ready to be made? Sounds like one. Did someone buy, buy the movie rights?
32:34 Speaker 01 From your lips, Neil.
32:39 Neil deGrasse Tyson? I saw recently a play about Marie Curie.
32:42 Speaker 01 Yes, there've been plays, there've been movies.
32:44 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Yeah.
32:45 Speaker 01 But, as I said, this is a different story. We'll see what happens.
32:49 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Yeah.
32:50 Speaker 01 Yeah.
32:50 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Yeah.
32:50 Speaker 01 Do you, do you remember her on the, on the mural? Of course you do.
32:54 Neil deGrasse Tyson? The, the huge mosaic at the front entrance of the Bronx High School of Science. You walk under that every single day. And it, it's very biblical in its scale and in the posturing of the characters. And every single character is a mathematician, a scientist, or an engineer. And one of them is Marie Curie, prominently featured.
33:16 Speaker 01 And she's the only woman there, yeah.
33:18 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Wow. And she's there looking at a test tube or something chemical. And we've got like a Galileo figure, a Newton, we have Imhotep, architect of ancient Egypt. Right. All these folk. And you walk under that every day. And you say, yeah.
33:37 Neil deGrasse Tyson? One day I'm gonna be on that mural. It's cool. Now, that's, that's, that's fantastic. It seems to me, everything Marie Curie touched in and around her lab might still be radioactive today.
33:50 Speaker 01 Yes.
33:51 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Is that true?
33:51 Speaker 01 I'm sure it is.
33:53 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Okay, how about her notes, her clothing, her, her effects?
33:58 Speaker 01 Yeah. Radium has a half-life of 1,600 years.
34:01 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Oh, well, there you have it. That's it? Yeah. 1,600 years. To remind people about half-life, so whatever, how much radium you have today, in 1,600 years, you have half that much. Right. And then 1,600 years, you have half of that. Half of that, so 3,200 years, you'll have one fourth of what's sitting in front of you right now. So clearly that's. So you day it. What is she, what does she die of?
34:21 Speaker 01 She died of aplastic anemia. So her body could no longer create red blood cells. Partly radioactivity exposure, but also X-ray exposure. Because during World War I, she outfitted a van with X-ray equipment and drove to the front because it was going to be the first time that battle wounds could be X-rayed.
34:46 Chuck Nice? She created a mobile X-ray unit?
34:49 Speaker 01 She did.
34:49 Chuck Nice? Wow. It was instantly obvious what the value of X-rays were when they were discovered.
34:55 Speaker 01 Even so, she had to argue with some of the doctors who had never seen it because it was still relatively new.
35:03 Chuck Nice? Okay.
35:03 Speaker 01 And so she, she created this car that had all the equipment. And then, because people were very quickly convinced and were willing to have, have something permanent wherever the field hospitals were. So she set up a course. She created a six-week course in X-ray, electricity, human anatomy, and she trained 150 French women to do that same work.
35:32 Chuck Nice? Wow. So every X-ray technician owes her Yes. a debt because they're, she created their job. Yes.
35:41 Speaker 01 Well, there were some before that, but they were coming up through the medical ranks. Her feeling was, this is a crisis and there are a lot of women who want to help. And I can, I can
35:55 Chuck Nice? Women are not on the front.
35:56 Speaker 01 I can tell them, I can tell them what they need to know and they can go and do it.
36:01 Chuck Nice? It's amazing because you learn about Marie Curie and like, they just say, radioactivity, they say that. Just the shortlist. The shortlist. They're like, radioactivity, Nobel Prize, woman scientist, and moving on. You know, like that's it. This is, I mean, I'm just absolutely gobsmacked by all the accomplishments this woman and what she's responsible for.
36:29 Speaker 01 When I started this book, the pandemic happened. So I didn't get to go to Paris. But what I discovered was that everything about Madame Curie has been digitized. So her personal notebooks, the most touching of which is the grief journals she kept for a year after her husband's death, in which she spoke to him. You can read the whole thing online.
36:54 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So you had access to digital records, so you didn't have to expose yourself to what might be residual radium?
36:59 Speaker 01 Well, I couldn't even have the grief of going to Paris, you know. It was, it was what I had to settle for. But I was fascinated by the wealth of the material. You can read all of the weekly publications of the Academy of Sciences back centuries, and it's easy to get at. And then her notebooks? Yes.
37:24 Chuck Nice? Okay.
37:24 Speaker 01 It's just...
37:25 Chuck Nice? Sold me!
37:26 Speaker 01 It's just free.
37:28 Chuck Nice? Had me at free.
37:29 Speaker 01 Get up your French reading, is the only thing.
37:32 Chuck Nice? I was all in French.
37:33 Speaker 01 Yeah.
37:34 Chuck Nice? Okay.
37:34 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Of course.
37:35 Chuck Nice? Yeah, unless it's just English and a really bad French accent, I'm screwed.
37:42 Neil deGrasse Tyson? He does a Frenchman bad accent really well.
37:46 Speaker 01 I bet, I bet, yeah.
37:48 Neil deGrasse Tyson? And you always give him a cigarette.
37:49 Chuck Nice? But of course, you have to have a cigarette, okay? It is French law. You do not want me to be arrested?
38:04 Neil deGrasse Tyson? How soon we forget, or perhaps never knew, or worse yet, suppressed, the contributions of so many people, so many scientists, engineers, seekers of cosmic truths, being in a laboratory or in the sky, anywhere. The number of people represented in that population is huge. Yet, we only ever read about a few of them here and there. And somehow... Some of us are prone to think the information, knowledge, discovery just somehow is handed to us from on high, from a tablet in the sky. No, it's hard work. And scientists who are
38:49 Neil deGrasse Tyson? committed have done this often without reward. The only reward is the act of discovery and the knowledge that the universe is knowable and you on the frontier, on that moving frontier, have contributed to that base of knowledge that we call science. Marie Curie, among others, and all the women in her lab, and all the other labs that we have yet to hear about, because Davis Sobel hasn't written about them yet. Who knows how many labs lurk in our ignorance for us to get a full appreciation of the foundations of what we take for granted
39:31 Neil deGrasse Tyson? as modern science. And that is a cosmic perspective. So, David, our first ever StarTalk guest, I want you to come back for every book that you write.
39:42 Speaker 01 I want to write another one just for that.
39:44 Neil deGrasse Tyson? If you need incentive to come back to StarTalk, write another damn book.
39:50 Speaker 01 I got it. Okay.
39:51 Neil deGrasse Tyson? You got it. Thanks for being on the show. Chuck, good to have you, man. Always a pleasure. All right. This has been StarTalk with our inaugural guest returning, coming back to us in this, the 600th episode of what she started as episode number one, Davis Sobel.
40:09 Speaker 01 Wow.
40:10 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Thanks for coming back.
40:11 Speaker 01 Wow.
40:12 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Neil Tyson here, your personal astrophysicist, as always. Keep looking up.
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