Marie Curie (9 page)

And no one else paid much attention to the question until 1925, when a young factory worker in New Jersey sued her employer after nine of her coworkers had died. They were dubbed “The Radium Girls.”

The women painted luminous numbers with radium-based paint on the dials of the newly popular wristwatches. To get the finest point on their brushes, the women were instructed to lick them. As a result, they were ingesting tiny amounts of radium. Some weren’t affected, and some were—their teeth began to fall out, their jawbones deteriorated, the women weakened and died a painful death. At least fifteen women died at one factory before doctors finally began to realize that even a small amount of radium was highly poisonous.

Today it’s a known fact that exposure to radiation poisons the body and actually causes cancer. It interferes with cell division, lodges in the bones, damages tissue, and creates abnormalities. Anemia and leukemia are frequently the results.

As for Marie, she recommended feeding raw liver to anyone who fell ill. In her mind, the fact that she was still alive—after such prolonged contact with radium—meant other people’s lack of exercise and fresh air was the cause of their sickness. But she wasn’t the picture of health, and she knew it. For years she’d had numbness in her fingers and obsessively rubbed them with her thumb to restore sensation. Her hearing was going, there was a constant humming in her ears, she was nearly blind from cataracts, and she suffered from fatigue and other ailments she blamed on overwork. She rarely went to doctors, none of whom made the connection between her symptoms and radium. In any case, no treatment would have been available. After several suspiciously premature deaths at the Institute, she installed stricter safety rules—people had to wear lead shields and could not handle radium with bare hands—but didn’t follow them herself. Always, her messages about radium’s safety were mixed.

Meanwhile, after her courageous war work and the achievements of her Institute, she became a heroine in France again. Even an icon. At a celebration in her honor at the Paris Opéra, all the notables in France thanked her for her contributions to science. The actress Sarah Bernhardt read “Ode to Madame Curie,” which called her a goddess. And in science circles, the reputation of her Institute was rising ever higher.

Another thrilling achievement was the 1932 opening of a second Radium Institute, in Warsaw. Her own sister Bronia became its director.

Every morning, a chauffeur drove Marie in a Ford (a gift from Henry Ford himself) to work. She continued to write books, swim, take snowshoe walks in the Alps to get the best views of sunsets. She was, at last, financially secure, and bought several vacation homes. Yet still, her most cherished time was working with Irène long hours into the night.

So many more things she wanted to accomplish. “It is sad that one can’t be doubled,” she wrote toward the end of her life.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Genius Genes

I
N HER OWN daughter, Marie did produce sort of double.

One day when Irène was a little girl, she electrified other children with an exact biological description of how babies were made. By the time she reached her teens, she was allowed to teach math and physics to her classmates.

Already in Marie’s own lifetime, she was inspiring young women to think science. Irène was just one of the many who idolized Marie.

When Irène was ten, Marie denied she was pushing her child into science: “She will be whatever she wants to be. All I ask of her right now is that she be healthy.” But Irène was clearly another brainiac, and Marie
was
a bit pushy. Once, when her daughter couldn’t come up with the correct answer to a problem, she threw Irène’s algebra notebook out the window into the garden two stories down. As her own father had done so many years before, Marie mailed Irène advanced math challenges to work on when they were apart. As her own mother had hinted that the better her children did at school, the more she loved them, Marie was at her fondest when Irène excelled.

As she grew up, Irène seemed nearly as driven as her mother. At the same time as she was tending to soldiers on the warfront, she managed to graduate from the Sorbonne
with honors
in math, physics, and chemistry. At the Institute, Irène was known as the Princess and was clearly being groomed as her mother’s successor.

Many American women were also inspired by Marie to pursue careers in science. When she visited the United States in 1921, only 41 women were working on doctorates in science. But by 1932 it was 138, with chemistry a favorite specialty.

Closer to home was the chemist Marguerite Perey, who started out at the Radium Institute as a test-tube washer. She went on to discover the radioactive element francium in 1939, and eventually became the first woman elected to the French Academy of Sciences in 1962, fifty-one years after Marie’s humiliating rejection.

Young boys found Marie inspirational as well. In France, one of them was Frédéric Joliot. He kept a photo of the Curies taped to his bedroom wall. As a promising young man he studied under Paul Langevin, who sent him over to Marie to be an assistant at the Institute. (Langevin also sent over a woman student he had had a child with, asking Marie to find her a job, which she did.)

Irène Curie married Frédéric in 1926. They took the joint name Joliot-Curie and began to work together in fine Marie-Pierre fashion. Marie disapproved of her son-in-law at first and worried he would take control of the Institute and its radium. But she soon came to realize what a “ball of fire” Frédéric Joliot was. In a complete turnabout, she urged him to get his advanced degrees and helped him develop as a scientist. The Curies were growing into a sort of royal dynasty.

At first the golden couple hit some frustrating roadblocks in their work. Their experiments pointed the way for others to make important discoveries, ones that filled in “missing pieces” in the anatomy of the atom.

Performing the same experiments as the Joliot-Curies, one of Rutherford’s assistants, James Chadwick, discovered the neutron. And in California in 1932, Carl david Anderson discovered what he called a positron, or positive electron. The Joliot-Curies had produced the same results as Chadwick but come to different conclusions. Frédéric wrote, “It is annoying to be overtaken by other laboratories which immediately take up one’s experiments.”

Still, Marie must have drawn considerable satisfaction at the seventh Solvay Conference of distinguished physicists in 1933, this one dedicated to nuclear physics. No longer was she the only woman in attendance. Besides Irène, there was also a German physicist, Lise Meitner.

And Marie also lived to see the stunning success in creating “artificial” radioactivity that put the Joliot-Curies on the map.

When they showed a frail Marie chemical proof of what they’d done, using her cherished element polonium in experiments, Frédéric noted “the expression of intense joy“ on Marie’s face. “This was doubtless the last great satisfaction of her life.” Because of her daughter and son-in-law, her work would continue on.

On her last day at work, Marie grew frustrated with an experiment not going well and left the lab early with fever and chills, mentioning to a gardener on her way out that the roses needed pruning. For two months, she lay sick in bed, finally succumbing on July 4, 1934. Her last words were “I want to be left in peace.” She was sixty-seven years old. Beyond a doubt, the cause of death was her decades-long exposure to radiation, even though her attitude remained mixed to the end: “Perhaps radium has something to do with [my] troubles, but it cannot be affirmed with certainty.”

After her funeral, she was buried next to Pierre, with her sister Bronia arriving to drop a handful of Polish soil into the grave.

Sadly, Marie missed her daughter’s day of greatest triumph. It came the following year. Irène Joliot-Curie became the second woman in history to win the Nobel Prize for chemistry. She and Frédéric (co-winner) both gave acceptance speeches, predicting “explosive” transmutations to come.

Indeed, their work speeded up the development of nuclear physics. The ability to create radioactivity artificially, in a lab, was a major step toward unlocking the secrets of an atom’s energy. Scientists were that much closer to figuring out how to release nuclear power and harness it. Both Irène and Frédéric hoped nuclear power would be used for peaceful purposes, like supplying energy to France to undercut the need for imported oil.

But World War II intervened, and the course of nuclear physics headed straight in the direction that Marie Curie and the Joliot-Curies feared most.

Building on Marie’s work and the work of the Joliot-Curies, scientists in the United States made the first atomic bomb.

In August of 1945, determined to end the long war, the United States dropped atomic bombs on two Japanese cities, first Hiroshima and then Nagasaki. Radiation’s full fury was unleashed, with over 100,000 people in Hiroshima instantly vaporized. Japan surrendered, and World War II was over.

Yes, the war ended. But suddenly warfare had taken on new dimensions. Now there were weapons capable of destruction on a scale never before seen. Besides those who were killed, hundreds of thousands more Japanese people suffered radiation sickness—burned and singed, their hair falling out, with persistent vomiting, and then long-term effects like leukemia and other cancers, their babies born with birth defects for years afterward.

Appalled, Irène said that she was glad Marie Curie, dead for eleven years, was no longer alive to bear witness. The dropping of atom bombs was a shocking event, to many the most shocking of the century. More than sixty years later, controversy still lingers over the decision.

In 1950, Frédéric Joliot-Curie was dismissed from the French Atomic Energy Commission for refusing to work on an atomic bomb. Irène, too, was an advocate for world peace and a member of the Nuclear disarmament Peace Council. More politically active than her mother, she also worked for women’s rights, helping to finally get the vote for French women in 1945.

In 1956, Irène died at age fifty-nine of leukemia brought on by—what else?—exposure to radium. Almost too ill himself to visit his wife’s deathbed, Frédéric died two years later from the same illness.

Years later, proving how small the world of French science was, Marie’s granddaughter Hélène married the grandson of Paul Langevin (Marie’s lover), extending the dynasty. Hélène became a leading particle physicist in the 1950s, studying the polarization of electrons emitted through decay. By 1957, she was director of research at the Institute of Nuclear Physics, a 580-person lab.

And what about Ève, Marie’s younger daughter? Her gift was for music, which didn’t impress Marie as much as Irène’s accomplishments in science. Ève’s relationship with Marie was not as smooth. “You torture your brows, you daub at your lips,” her mother would scold. “I like you when you’re not so tricked up. . . . You’ll never make me believe women were meant to walk on stilts. . . . Miles and miles of naked back! You run the risk of pleurisy.”

But the fashion-conscious Ève grew up to become healthy, independent, idealistic, a fighter for the French Resistance against the Nazis, and a war correspondent whose knowledge of German was helpful to the Allies. In 1937, she lovingly wrote and published a biography of her mother. One of the best-selling biographies of all time, it had the effect of making Marie Curie even more of an inspiration to young girls. Ève attained her own Nobel fame by working with her husband Henri Labouisse. He was director of UNICEF, the United Nations program devoted to the welfare of children, when it was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1965. Never having worked directly with radium, Ève was not exposed to its deadly rays. She lived to be 102.

Today we know for certain that Marie, Pierre, Irène, and Frédéric all suffered from radiation sickness. One of the great mysteries in science is why Marie didn’t die earlier—perhaps she really was unusually strong physically, or just inhumanly stubborn psychologically. Everything she touched, even her notebooks, remained so contaminated with radiation that until recently people had to sign a medical release before looking at her original papers.

But would Marie have changed anything? Probably not. “Life is not easy for any of us,” she once wrote. “But what of that? We must have perseverance and above all confidence in ourselves. We must believe we are gifted for something, and that this thing, at whatever cost, must be attained.”

In other words, great science requires great sacrifice. She certainly lived by her own words.

CHAPTER TWELVE

How She Changed the World

A
S MUCH AS she pooh-poohed the role of personality in science, Marie Curie’s celebrity carried a lot of weight. Although not single-handedly, she did pave the way to a new era in medicine, plus she laid the groundwork for seismic developments in physics and chemistry. Because of her, scientists had new ways of thinking about matter and energy.