LITMIR.BIZ

      CHAPTER 3

      New Light

      The Curies’ Radium and the Beauty of Patience

      Paris, 1898–1902—In a cold and damp wooden shed at the School of Chemistry and Physics, the Polish scientist Marie Curie, occasionally assisted by her French husband Pierre, crushes and grinds and cooks literally tons of processed pitchblende, the dirty brown material left over from the mining of uranium. The Curies are convinced that this unpromising substance contains two new elements, which they name polonium and radium. After endless chemical extractions, Marie obtains solutions that glow with pale blue-green light: a sign that they contain the intensely radioactive element radium. The significance of the work is recognized straight away, as Marie and Pierre, still struggling to forge scientific careers in France, are awarded the Nobel prize in physics in 1903.

      Marie Curie may well have felt ambivalent about becoming an icon for women’s place in science. Like several trail-blazing women scientists, she seemed eager that her sex be seen as irrelevant. Sadly, it was not. Those scientists, such as Albert Einstein and Ernest Rutherford, who accepted Marie without question as an equal, stand out for their lack of prejudice; most of the scientific community at the end of the nineteenth century was reluctant to believe that a woman could contribute new, bold and original ideas to science. When Marie was grudgingly awarded prizes for her groundbreaking studies of radioactivity, as likely as not the news would be communicated via her husband. It was only by a hair’s breadth that she was included in the decision of the 1903 Nobel committee. And when the Paris newspapers discovered that, several years after Pierre’s death, Marie had had an affair with one of his former colleagues, they bit on the scandal with relish, when similar behaviour from an eminent male scientist would probably have been deemed too trivial to mention.

      It is hardly surprising, then, that Marie took great pride in her work, carefully emphasizing her own contributions and hastening to publish them in the face of Pierre’s habitual indifference to public acclaim. Marie knew that, to make her mark, she would have to achieve twice as much as her male colleagues. And she did – which is why she became the only scientist to win two Nobel prizes in science.

      Her life has been so often romanticised – that process began as soon as the news came from Stockholm in 1903 – that Marie Curie herself has tended to disappear behind the stereotype of the tragic heroine. Yet it is true that her life was marred by several tragedies and by considerable adversity, and it is not surprising that in the end this left her hardened, appearing aloof and cold to those around her. Her determination and dedication to her work could translate as a certain prickliness and unfriendliness towards her colleagues. If she expected others to ignore the fact that she was a woman, likewise she herself had no concern about protecting brittle male egos.

      In as much as she discovered new elements, Marie Curie did nothing that others had not done previously. But the elements that she unearthed in her long and arduous experiment were like nothing anyone had seen before.

      New physics

      The elements that debuted in the periodic table in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century hint at the unattractive nationalism of that age: they bear names like gallium, germanium, scandium, francium. We can hardly begrudge Marie Curie her polonium, however, since her own sense of national pride was born out of Russian oppression. Poland was then part of the Russian empire, and after a rebellion in 1863 (four years before Marie’s birth) the country suffered from an intensive programme of ‘Russification’, during which the tsar forbade the use of the Polish language in official circles. The struggle of the Polish intelligentsia against the Russian authorities was a dangerous business in which some lost their lives.