Marie Curie, born greater than 150 years in the past, remains to be the one feminine scientist many individuals can title. The double Nobel Prize winner is most well-known for her discovery of radioactivity, in addition to the radioactive components radium and polonium. She is much less well-known for encouraging a era of girls who labored in her lab and went on to work in analysis due to the trail she paved. Although few ladies in science have reached Curie’s stage of fame and title recognition, they proceed to make positive aspects within the area due to her life and instance.
Within the new e book The Components of Marie Curie: How the Glow of Radium Lit a Path for Ladies in Science (Atlantic Month-to-month Press, 2024), writer (and Scientific American poetry editor) Dava Sobel chronicles Curie’s life and work, and sketches biographies of most of the ladies who labored together with her. Sobel discovered that few persons are acquainted with the community of researchers she nurtured, in addition to many different elements of the well-known chemist’s historical past. “Everyone is aware of her title, however hardly anyone is aware of something about her,” Sobel says.
Scientific American spoke with Sobel about Marie Curie’s contributions to science, historical past and gender equality.
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[An edited transcript of the interview follows.]
How did you study concerning the feminine scientists Curie labored with?
In 2020 I used to be requested to overview a e book referred to as Ladies in Their Factor, a set of essays about feminine chemists. The one two names I acknowledged to start with had been Marie Curie and her daughter [Irène Joliot-Curie]. However then as I learn, I used to be actually struck by the variety of ladies who had spent a while together with her, both finding out beneath her or working in her lab. By the fifth or sixth one, it actually began to appear to be a community. And thru the Curie Museum in Paris, I found there have been actually a minimum of 45 ladies who handed via her laboratory. She was the primary girl ever to show on the Sorbonne. After which that made her a magnet for these different ladies. Additionally, she was already world-famous as a result of she had gained the Nobel Prize, and that unfold her title all over the place. So I assumed, properly, that is one thing about Madame Curie that most individuals don’t know, and that’s how I received began.
How did Curie find yourself making the large discoveries she made?
She had extraordinary drive to get herself out of Warsaw to Paris, to have the ability to get a complicated schooling, to consider in herself that a lot [in the face of strong resistance toward women in science at the time], after which to be prepared and capable of do the form of laboratory work that she did. After which she married the appropriate individual. She and her husband Pierre Curie labored collectively when she began to do her doctoral analysis on this new discovery of [physicist Henri] Becquerel’s, uranic rays.
This was the radiation coming from uranium decay.
Proper. This was a brand new factor, and no person was listening to it as a result of all people was extra interested by x-rays on the time [in 1896]. And [Curie] thought she’d go after the much less thrilling subject; there have been 1,000 papers already written about x-rays, and no person was doing something with uranic rays. In order that was the appropriate time.
It’s wonderful to me that she entered this area at the moment after which had her first little one only a 12 months later, in 1897. I’d assumed, earlier than I learn the e book, that the youngsters got here properly after she’d established herself as a scientist.
It is a very feminine story. She had two kids; she had a miscarriage; she had bother nursing. A number of the ladies who got here to her lab stopped working after they received married and had kids. It’s been greater than 100 years, and that’s nonetheless true for a lot of ladies in science. I actually needed to satisfy these points instantly within the e book as a result of I feel it’s so vital for younger ladies to examine different feminine scientists and the way they managed.
Did Curie actively got down to recruit extra ladies into science?
I don’t assume she was particularly seeking to rent ladies, however what was totally different about her was that she had nothing towards hiring them. In order that was huge, after which once more, she was so distinguished that she attracted them and impressed them. There are a few ladies within the story who had been a lot youthful and grew up listening to about her, which made them assume, “Oh, I might be a scientist, too.” And the wonderful factor to me is how she nonetheless has that impact. She’s been lifeless for nearly 100 years, however she remains to be an inspiration—and never simply to ladies who go into science however ladies in a wide range of fields.
What do you assume most individuals get mistaken about Marie Curie?
You’ll usually hear that she didn’t actually do something: it was all Pierre, and he or she was simply his assistant. Pierre himself was on document debunking that, however no person listened.
One other criticism was, “She used her fingers, however not her head. She was very concerned in doing all of this very troublesome chemical extraction, which required repetition of many steps, and that was what she was good at.” That can be a really acquainted trope about ladies in science: that girls do that grunt work, the boring issues, and the boys simply have aha! moments 24 hours a day.
That form of angle is only one facet of the kind of resistance Curie confronted. What was the local weather like on the time for ladies in science?
She was working on this setting of big sexism. She was barred from the [French] Academy of Sciences. Despite the fact that she had a variety of assist, they didn’t vote her in, and to be printed of their weekly proceedings, to current your work, you needed to be a member. So she was continuously having to ask mates to current the work of the individuals in her laboratory, which was an infinite embarrassment. She was the premier authority on her topic, and he or she didn’t have the standing within the skilled neighborhood that she deserved. After which later, her daughter tried a number of occasions to get voted into the academy. She was additionally a Nobel Prize winner, and he or she couldn’t get in both. So sure, there was a variety of sexism, a variety of barricades, however she broke via most of them.
Past selling particular person ladies in science, how do you assume Curie modified science for ladies after her?
We’re speaking concerning the early 1900s, so physics altogether was at an inflection level, and he or she was, for 3 many years, the one girl within the room at these vital Solvay Convention conferences [a groundbreaking series of physics congresses that begin in 1911]. So she knew all the high physicists: [Ernest] Rutherford, [Albert] Einstein, [Enrico] Fermi, Niels Bohr, all people. She knew them personally, and I feel she normalized a few of that for them—that “oh, yeah, ladies do that, too,” which could not have occurred to them. So I feel, by her presence, she had an impact on her friends.
You’re Scientific American’s poetry column editor. Is there any connection between Curie and poetry?
Effectively, being Polish and being in a household that was very nationalistic, very pleased with their Polish heritage, she grew up on these three very well-known Polish poets [Adam Mickiewicz, Zygmunt Krasiński and Juliusz Słowacki], and her household additionally had a practice of writing verses on this or that event, and he or she wrote a few poems. She wrote about her life as a pupil when she was first in Paris. I don’t assume she ever wrote any poems about her work. And there have been a variety of poems written about her. Even Adrienne Wealthy wrote a poem about Madame Curie.
