The Elements of Marie Curie: How the Glow of Radium Lit a Path for Women in Science

by Dava Sobel

“A woman loves life for the living of it far more than we do. Women of genius are rare. Thus when we . . . give all our thoughts to some work which estranges us from those nearest us, it is with women that we must struggle.

The mistress also wishes to possess her lover, and would find it quite natural to sacrifice the rarest genius in the world for an hour of love.”

Her show of gratitude startled the granting agency and made Marie the anonymous patroness of another deserving student—someone as impoverished as she had been, and whose identity she would never know.

He preferred to turn all his attention to ascertaining the properties of radium, while Marie continued pouring her effort into accumulating more radium—a process that required fewer chemical reactions than the isolation of polonium.

Although the driver later swore he had steered the team to avoid the fallen man, a rear wagon wheel crushed Pierre’s skull, and he died there in the street. Calling cards in his pockets told police who he was.

“Soon I’ll have only your pictures to rely on. Oh! If only I could paint or sculpt a dear vision to keep you ever present in my eyes.”

“In the street I walk as if hypnotized, without noticing anything. I will not kill myself. I have no desire for suicide. But among all these vehicles is there not one to make me share the fate of my beloved?”

They settled on his widow as the only person qualified to assume his varied duties. Despite the lack of precedent for inducting a woman into their professorial ranks, the members of the university council made their unanimous decision official on May 13.

Thus Marie’s name appeared at the top of the list, made public on January 17, of the seven candidates vying for the physics seat.

Although she hated to leave the area she associated so closely with Pierre, she had reason to believe she would soon rejoin him there as a permanent resident of the Sceaux cemetery. These morbid thoughts held a firm basis in Marie’s reality: at forty-four, she was already two years past the age at which her mother had died.

By the autumn of 1912, all of the young women Marie had accepted into the Curie lab had moved on.

By late January 1921, she had the requisite sum in hand. For her next feat, she intended to import Mme. Curie and her daughters, and take them on a cross-country publicity tour highlighted by a stop at the White House to accept her gram of radium from the president of the United States.

Ève, soon to begin her own higher studies, said she saw “white-robed girls in line along the sunny roads; girls running by the thousand across grassy slopes to meet Mme. Curie’s carriage; girls waving flags and flowers, girls on parade, cheering, singing in chorus . . . Such was the dazzling vision of the first days.”

Marie had wanted Ève to attend medical school and pursue a career as a specialist in the treatment of cancer by radioactivity. But rather than try to sway her younger daughter’s choice of profession, she indulged Ève’s obvious talent by buying her a grand piano. It was the only extravagance to be found in their home.

Marie had never advocated the use of radium in commercial paint—or for any application outside a laboratory or hospital setting. The addition of thorium to the fabric of gas mantles had been common practice long before she recognized thorium’s radioactivity. And yet, responsibility for a host of ills seemed to be settling now on her shoulders.

“THE OLDER ONE GETS,” Marie observed in a reflective mood, “the more one realizes that knowing how to enjoy the present moment is a precious gift, comparable to a state of grace.” It was better to enjoy today today, she told her children, than to look back and savor it later, or to put off enjoyment till some distant tomorrow.

IN 1995, THE REMAINS of Marie and Pierre Curie were exhumed and transferred to an honored place in the Panthéon, the great domed shrine where French heroes such as Voltaire and Rousseau are interred. As had often been the case during her lifetime, Mme. Curie was the first woman accorded this ultimate tribute.