Marie Curie - Kathleen Krull [15]
After reading of two German professors’ experiments with the effects of radioactivity on the body, Pierre taped radium salts to his arm for ten hours. A blistering sore developed. It healed slowly, but left a permanent gray scar. The Curies took careful notes, disregarding personal injury, thinking only of the meaning for science. “This shouldn’t frighten people,” Pierre stressed.
If radium burned healthy skin tissue, could it be used to destroy diseased tissue? Pierre experimented on animals with cancerous tumors—mice, rabbits, and guinea pigs. Yes, he found out, cancer cells could be destroyed with normal tissue growing back. But then, in a later experiment, he put mice and guinea pigs into confined spaces with radium salts. All the animals died in less than nine hours. Breathing radium, it turned out, destroyed the lungs. So how much exposure to radium was too much? That was the ongoing question.
By the end of 1900, the Curies had written six more papers: two by Marie alone, one by Pierre alone, and three jointly. Other young scientists, excited by the discoveries, volunteered to work for them without pay. One was the chemist André-Louis debierne, one of Pierre’s pupils, who continued as Marie’s trusty assistant for the next thirty-five years.
In 1900, the Paris Exposition—a gigantic world’s fair—drew fifty million people. Surrounding the eleven-year-old Eiffel Tower were pavilions showcasing the latest advances in indoor plumbing, innovations in photography, the brand-new movies, and other wonders of technology. Electric lights were everywhere, and electricity powered a train as well as a moving walkway that took visitors around the whole Expo.
It was an exciting time to be alive. Wireless telegraph service between France and England had just been established, and companies were being formed to sell the relatively new invention of the telephone. People chattered about aeroplanes and horseless carriages. (The Wright Brothers’ first successful flight was only three years away, and Henry Ford’s Model T only eight years away.) A doctor named Sigmund Freud published The Interpretation of Dreams, which would revolutionize thinking about the human brain and further popularize psychotherapy.
The Curies were right in the thick of the excitement. As part of the Expo, scientists came in from all over the world for the International Congress of Physics. The biggest draw was the Curies’ presentation of their paper, “The New Radioactive Substances and the Rays They Emit.” It was their longest report so far, giving full credit to similar work going on in England and Germany. Their conclusion: “Spontaneous radiation is . . . a deeply astonishing subject.”
Why?
Because it seemed to violate a fundamental law of nature—that energy could not be created or destroyed. Yet, without diminishing, radium seemed to give off radiation ceaselessly. The Curies made a splash by urging a next step that would solve the mystery. They would locate the source of radiation’s strange energy.
Back in the lab, with Marie’s legendary labor of love approaching an end, she kept on processing her tons of pitchblende. She found out the hard way that a ton produces only a minuscule amount of radium salt. By 1902 she had a piece the size of a grain of rice. Here it was, physical evidence that proved that radium was a new element. Her discovery was now credible to skeptics.
Marie’s work to isolate radium had taken almost four years, during which she lost fifteen pounds and Pierre was constantly ill. Colleagues urged the couple to slow down for the sake of their health. One friend pleaded with them to stop endlessly obsessing about work “every instant of your life, as you are doing. You must allow the body to breathe. . . . You must not read or talk physics while you are eating.”
But hard work and sacrifice defined