Marie Curie - Kathleen Krull [1]
True enough, she was a genius, winning the prestigious Nobel Prize not once but twice, for Physics and then for Chemistry. She married a gifted scientist who dropped his own research to help with hers because it was more groundbreaking work. And she passed on her genius genes to her daughter, who went on to win a Nobel as well.
Marie Curie’s permanent claim to fame? She discovered radium and polonium—two new elements, or substances that cannot be broken down any further by chemical means. Lots of elements exist in nature—today we recognize more than one hundred, with new ones still being discovered. But as the Nobel Committee of 1911 pointed out, the discovery of radium in particular was “much greater than the discovery of other elements.” The radioactive rays it emits can be deadly, as Marie’s own family was to learn, but radium heralded exciting developments for treating cancer and opened a whole new world of atomic physics.
With radium, Marie didn’t just make a stunning contribution to medicine. In experimenting with elements that are radioactive—a word she coined herself—she fostered a greater understanding of the very nature of matter. With amazing foresight, in only her second paper on radioactivity, she called it an atomic phenomenon.
The atom: that building block of all matter. Since ancient times, the atom was believed to be unchangeable, indivisible, the absolute smallest thing that exists. But Curie’s work paved the way for other scientists to investigate what went on inside it. She spurred the discovery of subatomic particles that make up atoms. Ultimately, her work made possible the development of the deadliest weapon in history—the atomic bomb. How she would have hated knowing that! Nevertheless, Marie Curie helped provide the foundation for the atomic age in which all of us live today.
Marie had a tight-lipped, tough side—stubborn, consumed by work, a bit of a martyr. But she wasn’t a robot or a goody-goody. Indeed, she said, “I feel everything very violently, with a physical violence.”
This was a woman men threatened to fight duels over, someone so passionate about science that she used nine exclamation points to indicate an experiment going well, a person who dreaded publicity and yet was chased by paparazzi. By her mid-thirties, Marie Curie was a celebrity, one of the first people to be the subject of tabloid headlines. Her life story involved broken love affairs, death threats, séances, nail-biting competition, juicy scandal, great losses, and especially a fierce struggle against the strictures of nineteenth-century society. All her life she dealt with “No Girls Allowed” signs—they were everywhere.
Luckily, she had almost limitless reserves of patience. She spent eight years working in unsatisfying jobs before she could get to college. Later, she took almost four years to isolate her new element, radium. What stands out in her story is the amount of persistent hard work that science can entail.
As Marie herself put it: “A great discovery does not issue from a scientist’s brain ready-made . . . it is the fruit of an accumulation of preliminary work.” Or, in other words, a great scientist is never an overnight success. It takes years of hard work as well as taking advantage of the hard work of other great scientists who came before. As Isaac Newton said in his famous quote, he was able to see further thanks to his debts to others. So who helped Marie to see further?
Robert Boyle, for one, who was an English “natural philosopher” working at the same time as Newton. (The word “scientist” wasn’t coined until 1834.) Although he worked as an alchemist, searching for a way to change worthless metals into gold, Boyle also compiled an important book on chemistry. In 1661, in The Skeptical Chymist, he laid down some of the preliminaries of this new field, including the definition of an element—any substance that can’t be broken