The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer

by Siddhartha Mukherjee

In a waste ore called pitchblende, a black sludge that came from the peaty forests of Joachimsthal in what is now the Czech Republic, the Curies found the first signal of a new element—an element many times more radioactive than uranium. The Curies set about distilling the boggy sludge to trap that potent radioactive source in its purest form. From several tons of pitchblende, four hundred tons of washing water, and hundreds of buckets of distilled sludge waste, they finally fished out one-tenth of a gram of the new element in 1902. The metal lay on the far edge of the periodic table, emitting X-rays with such feverish intensity that it glowered with a hypnotic blue light in the dark, consuming itself. Unstable, it was a strange chimera between matter and energy—matter decomposing into energy. Marie Curie called the new element radium, from the Greek word for “light.” Radium, by virtue of its potency, revealed a new and unexpected property of X-rays: they could not only carry radiant energy through human tissues, but also deposit energy deep inside tissues. Röntgen had been able to photograph his wife’s hand because of the first property: his X-rays had traversed through flesh and bone and left a shadow of the tissue on the film. Marie Curie’s hands, in contrast, bore the painful legacy of the second effect: having distilled pitchblende into a millionth part for week after week in the hunt for purer and purer radioactivity, the skin in her palm had begun to chafe and peel ...