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

by Dava Sobel

Marie turned for help to her former professor, Gabriel Lippmann, who read aloud her paper, “Rays Emitted by the Compounds of Uranium and Thorium,” at the April 12 meeting. The most stunning remarks in Mme. Curie’s paper concerned the mineral pitchblende. She had examined three samples of the blackish ore, two from mines in eastern Europe and one from Cornwall in England. Each had yielded a different activity reading, with one of them tripling and another quadrupling the value for uranium. “This fact is very remarkable,” she affirmed, “and leads to the belief that these minerals may contain an element which is much more active than uranium.” Now all she had to do was find it.