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

by Dava Sobel

A century would pass before the term “glass ceiling” gained currency as a metaphor for invisible barriers to women’s advancement, but Marie Curie toiled under an actual glass ceiling from 1899 to 1902, the years she spent in that “poor, shabby hangar,” spinning pitchblende into radium.

“Errors are notoriously hard to kill,” she conceded in a letter to the editor of the Westminster Gazette, “but an error that ascribes to a man what was actually the work of a woman has more lives than