When Victor Ambros, a University of Massachusetts biologist, was awarded the 2024 Nobel Prize for medicine on 7 October, the prize committee published its congratulations on X. The post showed a beaming Ambros alongside his wife, Rosalind Lee, who, the post revealed, “was also the first author on the 1993 ‘Cell’ paper cited by the Nobel Committee”. The tart replies questioned whether Lee had been unfairly overlooked.
How husband-and-wife geniuses apportion credit for joint discoveries worthy of a Nobel, is a rarefied predicament – but one that has precedent. In 1903, Pierre Curie heard he was about to share the Nobel Prize for physics with fellow Frenchman Henri Becquerel for the discovery and study of radioactivity. That would have short-changed his wife and laboratory partner, Marie Curie. He protested to the committee that, “I should very much like to share the honour with Mme Curie and for us to be considered jointly, in the same way that we have done our work.”
And so, as science writer and historian Dava Sobel gracefully recounts in The Elements of Madame Curie, one of the most trailblazing scientists who ever lived secured the first of her two Nobels. It seemed only fair: it was Marie who coined the term “radioactivity”. The Curies’ observations rattled science: radioactivity, or the spontaneous emission of radiation from the decay of atomic nuclei, revealed atoms to be unstable and challenged the prevailing idea that the elements were immutable.
Most of us have a fuzzy sense of this legendary figure, associated with both science and cancer care. That, Sobel shows us, is because Marie Curie led an immeasurably consequential life. She co-invented and professionalised the new field of radioactivity research; shared groundbreaking observations with others working to understand the structure of atoms; discovered new elements; became the only person to win two Nobel prizes in different scientific fields; and developed radiotherapy for cancer treatment.
She consorted as an equal with figures like Albert Einstein and the New Zealand physicist Ernest Rutherford in a time of all-male science academies; backed the suffragist and peace movements; and nurtured countless talented women who flocked from across the world to her celebrated Paris laboratory. Sobel, the accomplished author of such historical accounts as Longitude and Galileo’s Daughter, here uses these women as a device, jointly naming each chapter after a female in Curie’s orbit and an element. It is a deft way of chronicling and humanising her vast intellectual oeuvre.
Marie Curie was born Maria Salomea Skłodowska in Warsaw in 1867, to a science-teacher father and a headmistress mother. She was proud of her Polish roots, later naming one element polonium. Her mother and eldest sister died of tuberculosis before Marie reached her teens, a tragedy she called “the first great sorrow of my life”. Manya, as she was known, was clever but Warsaw University did not admit women. At weekends she retreated to the city’s Museum of Industry and Agriculture, to conduct experiments in its laboratories.
In 1891, aged 24, Manya moved to Paris and became one of 23 women among more than 2,000 men to join the science faculty at the Sorbonne, registering as Marie. Two years later she was top of her class, winning a scholarship to study the industrially important topic of magnetism in steel. Another kind of attraction was on the cards: she met Pierre Curie, a physicist eight years her senior.
Marie was struck by the “tall young man with auburn hair and large limpid eyes”. By 1896, the pair were married, Pierre was a professor and the happy couple, with a child on the way, were making waves in magnetism research. But it was Becquerel’s discovery of “uranic rays”, the strange new energy exuded by uranium that we now call radioactivity, that intrigued her. She became an experimenter extraordinaire: preparing uranium samples, perfecting her apparatus, making careful observations, repeating measurements, faithfully recording everything in notebooks.
Pierre soon joined her efforts; their careful work hinted at two new elements, but they could not present their findings to the elite, all-male Académie des Sciences. Becquerel, a friend and academy member, broke the stunning news. By 1903, Marie had become the first woman in France to obtain a PhD in physics; had a miscarriage; and, with her husband, won her first Nobel Prize.
Tragically, Pierre died just three years later, run over by a wagon on a Paris street. A despairing Marie, by then with two young daughters, inherited Pierre’s academic post. “Sometimes I think that in this way it will be easiest for me to live,” she wrote to her lost husband in her journal. “Other times, I fear I am mad to attempt it.”
The Sorbonne’s first female professor went on to light a path for women in science, as Sobel puts it, by hosting a stream of gifted female “radioactivists”. Among them were Ellen Gleditsch, a pioneering radiochemist who would become Norway’s second female professor; and Marguerite Perey, who discovered the element francium. Curie seeded a worldwide network of female scholars who radiated proof that womanhood was no bar to scientific achievement.
Irène, Marie’s eldest daughter, was the ultimate protégé: she and her husband, Frédéric Joliot, won the Nobel Prize for chemistry in 1935 for making artificial radioactivity. Irène’s younger sister Ève became a writer, penning a biography of her mother, Madame Curie, that was published in 1937 and turned into a film a few years later. Work often kept Marie away from her daughters but, throughout their childhood, her love for them shines through in their letters.
Marie worked alongside Irène in field hospitals during the First World War (using X-rays to pinpoint shrapnel in injured soldiers) and later became a reluctant global celebrity. She met American presidents and endured lunches thrown in her honour. She remained frugal throughout: there were no posh frocks or fancy holidays; fan mail was binned; and money spent only on the radium (which in 1921 cost $100,000 a gram) needed for her research. One American magazine reporter who interviewed her was shocked to find not a confident colossus but “a pale, timid little woman in a black cotton dress, with the saddest face I ever looked upon”. Her face wore the grief of early widowhood and her body a lifetime of damaging radiation exposure.
Curie never remarried; adulterous trysts with the scientist Paul Langevin ended in scandal. Langevin’s wife threatened violence against Marie; a scurrilous account ended up in the papers, and Langevin challenged the editor to a duel. Marie relied heavily on her close-knit family, particularly her sister Bronisława, also living in Paris, for moral support throughout her life. The research, meanwhile, exacted another price: ill-health caused by radiation. Irène Joliot-Curie succumbed to leukaemia aged 58 (her writer sister Ève died aged 102). Marie died in 1934 aged 66, of aplastic anaemia. Her remains are interred, with those of Pierre, in the Panthéon in Paris, the mausoleum reserved for France’s greatest figures.
Maria Skłodowska-Curie never thought her encyclopaedic life worthy of a biography, preferring 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.”
Anjana Ahuja is the Financial Times’s science columnist
The Elements of Marie Curie: How the Glow of Radium Lit a Path for Women in Science
Dava Sobel
4th Estate, 336pp, £22
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[See also: The politics of the prehistoric past]
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This article appears in the 16 Oct 2024 issue of the New Statesman, Make or Break