What if Marie Curie’s greatest legacy was not her two Nobel prizes?

The Elements of Marie Curie: How the Glow of Radium Lit a Path for Women in Science Dava Sobel Atlantic Monthly Press (2024)
I vividly remember reading a biography of Maria Skłodowska (known as Marie Curie) written by her daughter Ève, when I was nine years old (Madame Curie, 1937). I was riveted by the story of this shy, bookish young woman who plunged her hands into sacks of pitchblende ore and pulled out new physics. I wanted to be a chemist like Curie — her laboratory shed with its leaky roof and lack of heat notwithstanding — prying chemical elements “from … dust by the force of her will”.
In The Elements of Marie Curie, historian of science Dava Sobel constructs a fresh portrait of the icon and two-time Nobel laureate. In her well-researched and compellingly written book, Sobel recounts how working with Curie raised the profile of many other pioneering women in radiochemistry and atomic physics.
I am certainly not the only chemist whose interest in science was kindled by learning of Curie’s story. Her radiant genius has so dazzled the world that, even now, almost a century after her death, she is the first — and often only — woman in science most people can name1. This can obscure the scientific contributions of women, past and present, and sets an incredibly high bar for young scientists. But some 45 women passed through Curie’s laboratory, and Sobel deftly interleaves her biography with sketches of the lives and scientific careers of nearly two dozen of them2.
These include Norwegian chemist Ellen Gleditsch, who determined the half-life of radium and contributed fundamental research on isotopes, and French physicist Marguerite Perey, the discoverer of francium. Few of these women are named in chemistry textbooks3, contributing to the sense that Curie is a singular case. For example, textbooks often mention UK radiochemist Frederick Soddy’s 1921 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for suggesting the existence of isotopes — but not Polish–Jewish chemist Stefanie Horowitz or Gleditsch, who confirmed this experimentally.
Not every woman who passed through Curie’s lab would go on to have a long or productive scientific career, as Sobel takes pains to point out. For example, Canadian physicist Harriet Brooks carried out pioneering work on thorium and radium in the early 1900s, yet would ultimately leave physics entirely.
Brooks was the first graduate student that New Zealand nuclear physicist Ernest Rutherford took in his laboratory at McGill University in Montreal, Canada. In 1901, she became the first woman to graduate there with a master’s degree. The university didn’t have a doctoral programme in physics at the time, so Brooks took up a fellowship at Bryn Mawr College, a private women’s college in Pennsylvania, where I work.
Having earned a PhD, Brooks went on to work with J.J. Thomson — who discovered the electron and had been Rutherford’s mentor — at the University of Cambridge, UK. After another stint in Rutherford’s group, she settled as a physics teacher at Barnard College, a women’s college affiliated with Columbia University in New York City. But having to choose between her faculty position and marriage, she broke off the engagement — and also moved abroad, to Curie’s rather low-key lab in Paris, where she worked from 1906 to 1907. Despite Rutherford describing her as the most prominent woman in physics working on radioactivity after Marie Curie, Brooks eventually turned down an offer to rejoin his lab, then situated in Manchester, UK, in favour of a marriage proposal and a return to Canada.
Sobel does not sidestep the overt misogyny of the time experienced by women in science — which certainly contributed to Brooks’ abandonment of her scientific research. She recounts how US physicist Theodore Lyman IV (known for his studies of the spectra of light) wrote to Gleditsch saying that no woman had yet set foot in Harvard University’s physics lab. And US radiochemist Bertram Boltwood (who established that uranium decays to lead) wrote to Rutherford in a panic, hoping, unsuccessfully, to prevent Gleditsch from arriving on his doorstep.
When Curie was a candidate for election to the French Academy of Sciences in 1911, the Institute of France, of which the science academy was one part, was clear that admitting a woman would be unthinkable, flying in the face of ‘immutable tradition’. That immutable tradition finally gave way in 1962 with the admission of one of Marie Curie’s last co-workers, Perey, to this august institution.
The Elements of Marie Curie is as much about the birth pains of the periodic table as it is about the lives of Curie and the scientists she trained. Beyond the elements Curie famously discovered — radium and polonium — I was intrigued by her connection to tungsten and molybdenum. I had not realized that Curie’s first independent research project was concerned with how the composition of steel, which can include these elements, affects its magnetic properties.
Her work on a substance called ionium is a reminder that the discovery of the elements didn’t take a linear route. Ionium, first thought to be a distinct element, was found to be an isotope of thorium (thorium-230). And radioneon, first referred to as an ‘emanation’ produced by radium, turned out to be its own element, and a noble gas. Its name was shortened to radon to parallel that of the other inert gases. Aptly, the last element featured in the book is francium, discovered by Perey, who acknowledged her debt to Madame Curie, and who, like her, wrote her doctoral dissertation on the discovery of an element.
Sobel’s explanations of the science are crisp and accessible. She also conveys the suspense felt among atomic-physics researchers at the time, and gives insights into scientists’ imaginations: “what would [radium] look like, forcibly stripped of its chloride or bromide companion … naked and alone?” Her description of the outermost (valence) electrons as those doing the “ordinary business of chemistry” is one I will pull out for my own students.
There’s enough detail to permit chemists and physicists to peer over Curie’s shoulder in the lab, as she painstakingly undertakes the fractional crystallization of radium chloride or seals a glass tube to create a radioactive standard. While reading the description of Curie and French chemist André-Louis Debierne’s electrochemical isolation of pure radium, I found myself reaching for a table of reduction potentials — the tendency of a species to be chemically reduced by gaining an electron — to follow along.
I have no fewer than five biographies of Curie on my shelves. Even so, Sobel brings out details of her life that I had not previously known. Sixteen-year-old Marie’s sketch of her dog Lancet reveals her as a talented artist. As the daughter of two scientists and the mother of another, I chuckled at Marie’s letter to her then 16-year-old daughter Irene, in which she sends her love, along with advice on how to construct an ellipse. In a scene reminiscent of one in my own lab, Sobel describes Curie’s researchers drinking tea out of glass beakers and stirring it with pipettes as they celebrate a student completing her doctorate, although I suspect that Curie’s were snagged from the lab, whereas ours serve only as kitchenware.
Are women in research being led up the garden path?
Like the invisible radiation that permeated her lab — her notebooks, including her cookbooks, are still radioactive — Marie’s grief over the loss of her beloved husband and collaborator Pierre Curie pervaded every corner of her life. Whereas Sobel doesn’t include the heart-wrenching scene from Ève’s biography of Marie sobbing over her husband’s bloodied clothes, she wields small details effectively to make Curie’s grief palpable. I discovered I was mistaken in thinking that the unit of radioactivity, the curie, honoured Marie. Rather, she had insisted that it be named for Pierre.
I was moved by Sobel’s poignant recounting of Curie’s last visit to the lab she had shared with her husband before it was demolished, where Pierre’s handwriting could still be seen on the blackboard. Flicking through Sobel’s brief biographies of ‘radioactivists’, from the well-known (Henri Becquerel) to the less familiar (Erzsébet Róna), included as an appendix, I was struck by how many of them — including Marie Curie, aged 66 — died from aplastic anaemia and other maladies that might have resulted from their research.
Elements of Marie Curie beautifully illuminates the science and the scientists that Curie devoted her life to developing. To quote Maria Goeppert Mayer, the second woman to win a Nobel Prize in Physics, “winning the [Nobel] prize wasn’t half as exciting as doing the work itself”. Sobel gives us a chance to share in the excitement and delight of the work that made Curie and her dozens of scientific offspring glow so brightly.