Marie Curie - Kathleen Krull [30]
Today we know for certain that Marie, Pierre, Irène, and Frédéric all suffered from radiation sickness. One of the great mysteries in science is why Marie didn’t die earlier—perhaps she really was unusually strong physically, or just inhumanly stubborn psychologically. Everything she touched, even her notebooks, remained so contaminated with radiation that until recently people had to sign a medical release before looking at her original papers.
But would Marie have changed anything? Probably not. “Life is not easy for any of us,” she once wrote. “But what of that? We must have perseverance and above all confidence in ourselves. We must believe we are gifted for something, and that this thing, at whatever cost, must be attained.”
In other words, great science requires great sacrifice. She certainly lived by her own words.
CHAPTER TWELVE
How She Changed the World
AS MUCH AS she pooh-poohed the role of personality in science, Marie Curie’s celebrity carried a lot of weight. Although not single-handedly, she did pave the way to a new era in medicine, plus she laid the groundwork for seismic developments in physics and chemistry. Because of her, scientists had new ways of thinking about matter and energy.
The discovery of radium opened the new field of radioactivity. In the years since, radium has been put to use in a boggling number of ways. Most important, radium offered an effective means to treat cancer. By the mid-1950s, doctors began refining radiation therapy by replacing radium with another element, cobalt—much safer, cheaper, and more effective. Today radiation therapy is just one weapon in an arsenal of cancer treatments. Meanwhile, scientists continue to look for a cure for the disease.
From the study of radioactivity came radiocarbon-dating techniques. Since we know the half-lives of various forms of the element carbon, we can use them to ascertain the ages of carbon-containing fossils, rocks, and other archeological finds. From such work have come measurements indicating that our Earth is four billion years old. various industries use radioactivity, with strict safety precautions. The food industry, for example, uses it to kill organisms that cause disease and spoil food. Companies that manufacture film, lenses, and other items use radioactivity to remove static-causing dust.
Perhaps most important of all, Marie’s work led to a redefinition of the atom, which, since ancient times, was considered unchangeable and indivisible. Quite the opposite—it turned out that the atom is like a universe, containing whole worlds inside it.
Nuclear power—despite its potential dangers—still offers a source of plentiful energy less damaging to the environment than energy from fossil fuels. Today, thanks in part to Marie’s son-in-law Frédéric, France’s nuclear power plants generate 80 percent of the country’s energy.
The United States uses nuclear power to provide about 20 percent of the electricity it uses. Such a policy remains hotly debated. Nuclear accidents can and do occur, the worst occurring in the Ukraine in 1986. At the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant, an accidental explosion released 100 million curies of radioactive material, killing dozens immediately. Three hundred thousand people had to be evacuated. Over six million people across Russia and Europe were exposed to contamination. Some scientists predict that premature death rates from cancer and other diseases will be higher than normal among the exposed, though estimates vary widely.
Harnessing nuclear energy can be the hope of the world—or it can be the agent of its destruction. After the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Albert Einstein mourned the events and considered himself as well as other scientists obligated to make sure atomic weapons were never used again.
Since 1945, nuclear weapons have not been used. But the threat hovers. The United States is no longer the only country with the technology to make an atom bomb. More and more countries have atomic bombs of their own, and we pay close attention to which ones are stashing