The Elements of Marie Curie
By Dava Sobel
Published by 4th Estate (2024)
This review is by Anthony Lipmann
When asked to write her autobiography following an exhausting trip to America in 1921, Marie Curie protested that 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 disdain for fame has not prevented the publication of hundreds of biographies and articles. What distinguishes this latest is the contemporary imperative to tell a wider female story – hence the subtitle - ‘How the Glow of Radium Lit a Path for Women in Science’.
Sobel shows how 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 bringing in a host of bright young female physicists from as far as Canada, Norway, Sweden, Hungary, England, Poland and others. By the 1930s her Radium Institute had over 30 such appointees.
When the young Polish Marya Skłodowska (later Marie Curie) first reaches Paris in 1891 aged 24, her first observation is not about science but freedom. She remarks of the French that ‘its citizens… openly spoke their own language’. It was a statement of someone from a country under occupation. Her home region was under Russian hegemony and 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 free from the oppressor’s ideology.
If anything, it may have strengthened her resolve to be respected for her work despite the chauvinism of the age. Having said this, her biography records how she was supported and mentored by a number of gender-blind men. First up 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’ and suggests this as a subject and mentors her for a doctoral dissertation. When the time comes for her findings to be presented to The Academie des Sciences, Lippmann must present her findings, as her gender does not permit her to do so.
It is through this work that she is introduced 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 to be read by Lippmann again.
Via their continued joint investigations, not three years after Alfred Nobel’s prize is launched Pierre and Marie become the recipients in 1903 for their joint work on the isolation of radium and polonium after Pierre refuses the Nobel unless his wife is jointly awarded it.
Dava Sobel, author of ‘Longitude’ (1995), connects the depredations of Marya Sklodowska’s occupied Poland with the drive to create a ‘dream for her country’; an ambition, you might say, not fully realised until the 1980s.
My first wife, a psychologist from Warsaw, had also been taught in Russian in the 1960s & 70s and described to me how students found it oppressive to learn in the occupier’s tongue and secretly read in Polish at home. It is a story that connects the experience of women in occupied nations from Afghanistan to Ukraine studying underground – and like all those driven to escape their own country, the young Sklodowska feels guilt about leaving her homeland.
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 to the family in Poland that she missed so much. Her fortunate partnership with Pierre can be said to have changed the course of science and 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 public to run 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 that is a union of minds and deep respect that allows Pierre and Marie 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.
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