Marie Curie (6 page)

Curiously, at this point in their lives, they both found time to attend several séances, particularly with a famous Italian “medium.” Like some other scientists of the day, the Curies kept an open mind about spiritualism, the belief that communication with the dead was possible. They weren’t interested in contacting any dead person in particular, they just wanted to explore the possibilities. “It is human nature to believe that the phenomena we know are the only ones that exist,” Marie wrote, “and whenever some chance discovery extends the limits of our knowledge we are filled with amazement.” She was talking about radioactivity, but she could almost have been talking about the supernatural: “We cannot become accustomed to the idea that we live in a world that is revealed to us only in a restricted portion of its manifestations.”

At séances they took notes, like the good scientists they were. Objects flew around in the air, unseen hands pinched them, and ghosts seemed to appear from nowhere. Pierre, in fact, was starting to spend more time studying the paranormal than anything else. He wondered if it had a relationship to radioactivity—could communication with the dead be another form of energy, one that would possibly reveal radioactivity’s source of energy? This line of speculation led to no conclusions.

As a result of her traditional scientific research, Marie Curie received her doctorate in science from the Sorbonne in 1903—the first woman in France to be awarded one in any subject. According to her examination committee, Marie’s findings represented the greatest scientific contribution ever made in a doctoral thesis.

At a celebration dinner that night, with several noted scientists attending, Pierre toasted Marie with a glass tube of radium salt in a solution. (He did not drink it, if you’re wondering!) Outside in the garden, the tube became luminous, glowing against the darkening sky, illuminating Marie’s happy face and also his own burned, permanently scarred fingers.

Theirs was a rare partnership, luminous itself. As Frederick Soddy, another brilliant physicist competing with them, was later to say, “Pierre Curie’s greatest discovery was Marie. . . . Her greatest discovery was . . . radioactivity.”

CHAPTER SIX

Suddenly Famous

T
HE YEAR 1903 also brought the Curies the ultimate in gold medals: a Nobel Prize for Physics, shared with Henri Becquerel, for the discovery of radioactivity.

Alfred Nobel, the rich Swedish inventor of dynamite, had established the prizes in 1901 to honor each year’s greatest contributions to society in a number of different fields. (Röntgen won the first Nobel in physics.) The Swedish Academy, which administered the prizes, at first was going to exclude Marie. The committee assumed she merely assisted her husband. But Pierre found out and alerted supporters, who successfully lobbied for Marie as co-winner. Even so, at the award ceremony, the committee referred to Marie in condescending terms as Eve, a helpmate created by God for Adam.

To the committee’s consternation, neither Curie attended the ceremony in Sweden. These awards were only two years old. Like most people, the Curies didn’t seem totally aware of a Nobel’s import. Even though a considerable cash award came with the prize, Pierre didn’t want to give up the extra money he was making from lectures. Plus he was experiencing pain in his arms and legs, starting to have a hard time getting dressed. Rheumatism, he assumed. And Marie had just suffered a heartbreaking miscarriage.

Before 1903, only the Nobel Prizes for Literature and Peace had garnered much attention in the news. The prizes in science had been considered way too esoteric to engage the general public. Now, for the first time, there was buzz about the Nobel for Physics. A lot of buzz. Marie Curie was an object of intense curiosity. A woman contributing to science? Unheard of. A couple involved romantically
and
professionally? A new concept. Most people didn’t know what to make of the Curies.

Marie was cast as the Polish Cinderella, the beautiful poor immigrant rescued by Prince Pierre, toiling on to discover a shiny something that held promise to cure all the ills in the world. Even serious newspapers started articles on her with “Once upon a time . . .” Others turned this Polish immigrant into a French heroine: “Let’s not quibble about nationality,” wrote one Parisian reporter. Someone in America wanted to name a racehorse after her.

Fame was a jolt. Marie was pursued by an early form of paparazzi eager for any details of her personal life, trying to judge if she was “properly” feminine. Some reporters managed to get into the Curies’ house while Marie was out. She would pick up a paper and read descriptions of Irène, of their black-and-white cat didi, reports of things her daughter talked about.

“We must be interested in things, not in persons,” she lectured a nosy reporter. It got to the point that when people approached her, she sometimes denied being Marie Curie: “You must be mistaken,” she’d say with dignity, then vanish.

Pierre, who required absolute tranquility around him in order to think, was appalled by the post-Nobel frenzy. He called it “the disaster of our lives.” He was in the middle of experiments with radioactivity, passing radium through a magnetic field, and testing the amount of energy it put out by watching it heat water. One gram of radium took only one hour to heat a gram of water from freezing temperature to boiling—an astounding source of energy.

Now there were all these distractions from work. He bemoaned “this frittering away of our time.”

Their horror of publicity deepened when there was a new baby to protect—Ève, born in 1905 when Irène was seven and Marie thirty-eight. She duly noted expenses for celebratory telegrams and a bottle of champagne in her notebook.

Although exasperating for them at times, the Curies’ Nobel Prize aroused an abiding public interest in science. The work of researchers was now classified as must-know, their findings fascinating, the people captivating. Science was on the map, an impossible-to-ignore shaper of the twentieth century.

The Curies did appreciate the substantial amount of cash (split 50/50 with Becquerel) that came with the prize. For the first time, they had funds to pay an assistant. They also installed a modern bathroom. Sometimes Marie treated herself to a jar of caviar on the way home.

There were professional benefits as well. In 1904, Pierre was appointed to an important professorship in physics at the Sorbonne. The following year, he was elected to the prestigious French Academy of Sciences. This meant access to more funding and power. Electing a woman was, of course, still out of the question. In all of its 238 years, there had been few groups more staunchly male.

Radioactivity was ill-understood by the public, but radium was visible. And highly commercial. Minuscule amounts were put into any number of products. Surely it couldn’t be dangerous, when it was touted as the cure for every ill. One ludicrous headline declared, “Radium Makes Blind Girl See.”

Quack applications of real as well as fake radium became a multi-million-dollar business. It was put into hair tonic (promising to stop hair loss as well as get rid of gray), toothpaste, lipstick, suppositories. There were glow-in-the-dark costumes for dancers, radiant cocktails at restaurants. Chic people carried tiny vials of radium salt in their pockets, thinking to keep themselves healthy. There wasn’t much Marie could do about the bogus attempts to make money off radium, though she did hire a lawyer when an “Alfred Curie” began selling “Crème Tho-Radia.”

Meanwhile, real science sped forward. New Zealander Ernest Rutherford, using radioactive materials generously supplied by Marie, was working hard to prove his “transformation theory,” which claimed that radioactive elements actually change into other elements. In the process of changing, they give off radiation. He wrote about radioactive elements “which in their disintegration liberate enormous amounts of energy.”

In other words, elements like radium were unstable, and in the process of spontaneously breaking down, were decaying into other elements. It was this decay that was sending out energy in the form of his alpha and beta rays.

The Curies resisted Rutherford’s theory at first. Could something really be called an element if it was so unstable? But the decay theory had legs. And as evidence mounted, the Curies were gradually coming around to Rutherford’s point of view. For one thing, it confirmed Marie’s speculation that radioactivity was a subatomic property. There was something going on in the atom itself.

Medicine was the first scientific arena to be affected by radioactivity. In 1904, the first textbook describing radium treatments for cancer patients appeared.

That same year, Rutherford was exploring what radioactivity might reveal about how old minerals were. He came up with the term “half-life,” which refers to the amount of time it takes one half of an unstable element to decay or change into either another element or a different form of itself. Not all elements have a half-life, only unstable ones. That’s because as unstable elements give off radiation, they change. depending on the specific material, the half-life could be as short as a second or as long as a billion years. But an element’s half-life never changed. So, for example, scientists could figure out the exact age of a certain piece of uranium by calculating how far it had decayed. Using this method, Rutherford found out that a piece of uranium from Connecticut was 550 million years old. Rutherford’s work, as he himself said, “increases the possible limit of the duration of life on this planet, and allows the time claimed by the geologist and biologist for the process of evolution.” In other words, the aging of elements was helping to prove darwin right about the Earth being far older than the biblical projection of six thousand years.

In 1905, an amateur Swiss physicist, Albert Einstein, also had some thoughts about unstable elements. According to his calculation (the famous theory of relativity), very small amounts of matter were capable of turning into huge amounts of energy. Radioactivity was an extraordinarily effective means of producing energy.

In 1906, Marie voiced her acceptance of the decay theory. Through the decay theory, she was able to refute another scientist’s claim to have isolated a new element that was suspiciously similar to her polonium. She published a study showing how polonium decayed and became what the other scientist was calling “radiotellurium.” But the two had the same half-life and thus were one and the same. In establishing polonium’s half-life, Marie was shoring up her own discoveries.

Pierre’s contributions were diminishing. discombobulated by the distractions of fame, he wrote, “There are days when we scarcely have time to breathe.” Still, he noted that Marie “does not lose a minute” between teaching, child care, and putting in many more hours than he did at the lab, even finding time for occasional concerts and art exhibits. Of course, Marie as usual pushed herself to the point of overload. One of Ève’s very first memories was of her exhausted mother fainting and falling to the floor.

In 1904, Marie wrote a magazine article detailing her discoveries so far, ending with a very practical plea for more resources to continue their work: “At the present time we possess only about a gram of pure salts of radium. Research in all branches of experimental science—physics, chemistry, physiology, medicine—is impeded, and a whole evolution in science is retarded, by the lack of this precious and unique material, which can now be obtained only at great expense.” Years would pass before her plea was answered, but in the meantime she was always generous in supplying fellow researchers with samples of what she produced, allowing competitors to make further discoveries. Marie even gave free consultation to factories in the United States, who adopted her method for extracting radium to produce commercial products.

Finally finding a moment to take a break, the Curies traveled in 1905 to Sweden to give their Nobel lecture at the Swedish Academy. Pierre was designated to give the speech (Marie had to sit in the audience!), but her husband gave her full credit, mentioning her name ten times and himself only five.

His speech has become famous for its dark prediction. For the first time, someone was prophesying the potential for evil from radium, which unleashed such tremendous energy: “Radium could become very dangerous in criminal hands,” warned Pierre—“a terrible means of destruction in the hands of criminals who are leading the people toward war.”

Still, he remained firmly in the camp of those convinced that radium would do more good than harm, and that discovering the secrets of nature was worth the risk.

But by this time, his leg bones were deteriorating. Some days he could barely stand upright. He was forty-eight years old. Not young. But not old.

CHAPTER SEVEN

Shock

“
W
E WERE HAPPY,” Marie wrote about the family’s Easter vacation in April 1906. Everyone frolicked in the countryside, enjoying the signs of spring, both parents watching their girls chasing butterflies, Pierre picking bouquets of marigolds for Marie.

But she was not pleased when he returned to Paris early to do some work. Nor did her mood improve when she and the children arrived home. In a rare instance of role reversal, she and Pierre argued because he was anxious for her to join him in the lab right away. Marie, normally the obsessive workaholic, wanted her break to last a little longer.

“don’t torment me,” she told her husband on his way out the door—a clue that her life was more a precarious balancing act than she publicly let on. On this crucial day, she chose to be with her children instead of in the lab.

The day was chilly and rainy. Pierre went from the lab to a business lunch, then later walked to the library from the Sorbonne. Stepping off a curb into the most crowded intersection in Paris, he walked straight into the path of a horse-drawn wagon. It dragged him under, crushing his skull.

He died instantly.

Would he have been able to avoid the fall if his legs had been stronger? Was he daydreaming, instead of paying attention to the traffic? Or was he thinking about his last unpleasant conversation with Marie? What if the day hadn’t been rainy and an umbrella hadn’t obscured his vision? Of all the questions, the one that most taunted Marie was why had her last words to him been reproachful, so harsh and uncharacteristic of their love?