Marie Curie - Kathleen Krull [28]
As she grew up, Irène seemed nearly as driven as her mother. At the same time as she was tending to soldiers on the warfront, she managed to graduate from the Sorbonne with honors in math, physics, and chemistry. At the Institute, Irène was known as the Princess and was clearly being groomed as her mother’s successor.
Many American women were also inspired by Marie to pursue careers in science. When she visited the United States in 1921, only 41 women were working on doctorates in science. But by 1932 it was 138, with chemistry a favorite specialty.
Closer to home was the chemist Marguerite Perey, who started out at the Radium Institute as a test-tube washer. She went on to discover the radioactive element francium in 1939, and eventually became the first woman elected to the French Academy of Sciences in 1962, fifty-one years after Marie’s humiliating rejection.
Young boys found Marie inspirational as well. In France, one of them was Frédéric Joliot. He kept a photo of the Curies taped to his bedroom wall. As a promising young man he studied under Paul Langevin, who sent him over to Marie to be an assistant at the Institute. (Langevin also sent over a woman student he had had a child with, asking Marie to find her a job, which she did.)
Irène Curie married Frédéric in 1926. They took the joint name Joliot-Curie and began to work together in fine Marie-Pierre fashion. Marie disapproved of her son-in-law at first and worried he would take control of the Institute and its radium. But she soon came to realize what a “ball of fire” Frédéric Joliot was. In a complete turnabout, she urged him to get his advanced degrees and helped him develop as a scientist. The Curies were growing into a sort of royal dynasty.
At first the golden couple hit some frustrating roadblocks in their work. Their experiments pointed the way for others to make important discoveries, ones that filled in “missing pieces” in the anatomy of the atom.
Performing the same experiments as the Joliot-Curies, one of Rutherford’s assistants, James Chadwick, discovered the neutron. And in California in 1932, Carl david Anderson discovered what he called a positron, or positive electron. The Joliot-Curies had produced the same results as Chadwick but come to different conclusions. Frédéric wrote, “It is annoying to be overtaken by other laboratories which immediately take up one’s experiments.”
Still, Marie must have drawn considerable satisfaction at the seventh Solvay Conference of distinguished physicists in 1933, this one dedicated to nuclear physics. No longer was she the only woman in attendance. Besides Irène, there was also a German physicist, Lise Meitner.
And Marie also lived to see the stunning success in creating “artificial” radioactivity that put the Joliot-Curies on the map.
When they showed a frail Marie chemical proof of what they’d done, using her cherished element polonium in experiments, Frédéric noted “the expression of intense joy“ on Marie’s face. “This was doubtless the last great satisfaction of her life.” Because of her daughter and son-in-law, her work would continue on.
On her last day at work, Marie grew frustrated with an experiment not going well and left the lab early with fever and chills, mentioning to a gardener on her way out that the roses needed pruning. For two months, she lay sick in bed, finally succumbing on July 4, 1934. Her last words were “I want to be left in peace.” She was sixty-seven years old. Beyond a doubt, the cause of death was her decades-long exposure to radiation, even though her attitude remained mixed to the end: “Perhaps radium has something to do with [my] troubles, but it cannot be affirmed with certainty.”
After her funeral, she was buried next to Pierre, with her sister Bronia arriving to drop a handful of Polish soil into the grave.
Sadly, Marie missed