Marie Curie - Kathleen Krull [29]
Indeed, their work speeded up the development of nuclear physics. The ability to create radioactivity artificially, in a lab, was a major step toward unlocking the secrets of an atom’s energy. Scientists were that much closer to figuring out how to release nuclear power and harness it. Both Irène and Frédéric hoped nuclear power would be used for peaceful purposes, like supplying energy to France to undercut the need for imported oil.
But World War II intervened, and the course of nuclear physics headed straight in the direction that Marie Curie and the Joliot-Curies feared most.
Building on Marie’s work and the work of the Joliot-Curies, scientists in the United States made the first atomic bomb.
In August of 1945, determined to end the long war, the United States dropped atomic bombs on two Japanese cities, first Hiroshima and then Nagasaki. Radiation’s full fury was unleashed, with over 100,000 people in Hiroshima instantly vaporized. Japan surrendered, and World War II was over.
Yes, the war ended. But suddenly warfare had taken on new dimensions. Now there were weapons capable of destruction on a scale never before seen. Besides those who were killed, hundreds of thousands more Japanese people suffered radiation sickness—burned and singed, their hair falling out, with persistent vomiting, and then long-term effects like leukemia and other cancers, their babies born with birth defects for years afterward.
Appalled, Irène said that she was glad Marie Curie, dead for eleven years, was no longer alive to bear witness. The dropping of atom bombs was a shocking event, to many the most shocking of the century. More than sixty years later, controversy still lingers over the decision.
In 1950, Frédéric Joliot-Curie was dismissed from the French Atomic Energy Commission for refusing to work on an atomic bomb. Irène, too, was an advocate for world peace and a member of the Nuclear disarmament Peace Council. More politically active than her mother, she also worked for women’s rights, helping to finally get the vote for French women in 1945.
In 1956, Irène died at age fifty-nine of leukemia brought on by—what else?—exposure to radium. Almost too ill himself to visit his wife’s deathbed, Frédéric died two years later from the same illness.
Years later, proving how small the world of French science was, Marie’s granddaughter Hélène married the grandson of Paul Langevin (Marie’s lover), extending the dynasty. Hélène became a leading particle physicist in the 1950s, studying the polarization of electrons emitted through decay. By 1957, she was director of research at the Institute of Nuclear Physics, a 580-person lab.
And what about Ève, Marie’s younger daughter? Her gift was for music, which didn’t impress Marie as much as Irène’s accomplishments in science. Ève’s relationship with Marie was not as smooth. “You torture your brows, you daub at your lips,” her mother would scold. “I like you when you’re not so tricked up. . . . You’ll never make me believe women were meant to walk on stilts. . . . Miles and miles of naked back! You run the risk of pleurisy.”
But the fashion-conscious Ève grew up to become healthy, independent, idealistic, a fighter for the French Resistance against the Nazis, and a war correspondent whose knowledge of German was helpful to the Allies. In 1937, she lovingly wrote and published a biography of her mother. One of the best-selling biographies of all time, it had the effect of making Marie Curie even more of an inspiration to young girls. Ève attained her own Nobel fame by working with her husband Henri Labouisse. He was director of UNICEF, the United Nations program devoted to the welfare of children, when it was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1965. Never having worked directly with radium, Ève was not exposed to its deadly rays.