Preface

Formula for an Icon:
Marie Curie (1867–1934)

Even now, nearly a century after her death, Marie Curie remains the only female scientist whom most people can name.

She achieved her iconic status in spite of everything that stood in her way. Women were barred from university study in her native Warsaw, let alone from a career as a research scientist. Yet she succeeded in fully inhabiting that role. She inhabits it still.

The Nobel Prize in Physics, which she shared with her husband, Pierre, in 1903, and the Nobel Prize in Chemistry, awarded to her alone in 1911, surely helped immortalize her name. “Two-time Nobel Prize winner” continues to provide a ready shorthand explanation for Marie Curie’s enduring fame. She was the first woman to receive a Nobel Prize, and the first person to win two of them. To date she remains the only Nobel laureate ever decorated in two separate fields of science.

Her twin prize medals, identically cast in solid gold, symbolize the gulf between the disparate ideals of womanhood and science. Each medal bears the bearded face of founder Alfred Nobel, the inventor of dynamite. On the reverse, two goddess figures in flowing robes mime a moment of discovery: “Science” raises her right hand to lift the veil from the visage of “Nature,” who stands austere and bare-breasted, holding a cornucopia. The design consigns women to the realm of allegory, while the prizewinner’s name engraved beneath the scene is typically that of a man in the mold of Alfred Nobel.

The 1903 Nobel Prize brought wealth as well as honor to the Curies, with a monetary reward of 70,000 gold francs. In return, Marie Curie helped burnish the luster of the Nobel Prize, which was then a novel phenomenon, first conferred in 1901. The storm of publicity that blew around her achievement spread both her name and the prize’s name worldwide.

In 1906, after Pierre’s untimely death in a senseless accident, the grieving Marie vowed to carry on their joint work. She stepped into her husband’s place as director of the Curie laboratory and also took over his chair at the University of Paris, becoming that institution’s first female professor. In her unique position, she could not help but attract numerous talented young women who wanted to work or study under her. They came from within France and also from abroad, as she had done when she left home to study at the Sorbonne. They included eager-to-be chemists and physicists from eastern Europe, Scandinavia, Russia, Great Britain, and Canada. As she nurtured her laboratory mentees, she also organized a small cooperative school for the sons and daughters of her friends, in which she taught a weekly physics class with hands-on activities.

By the time of her second Nobel, she was not only famous but infamous in the wake of a scandalous love affair. It took the Great War, which sent her to the front lines in a mobile X-ray unit of her own design, to restore her reputation as a heroine. In the 1920s, on two triumphal visits to America, she won new admirers by retaining her modest dress and direct manner even when speaking at large gatherings or meeting the president. Well before her death in 1934, she prepared her elder daughter to succeed her as laboratory director. Her younger daughter, who stayed with her at the sanitarium where she passed her final days, later told the illustrious, loving mother’s life story in an acclaimed biography, called simply Madame Curie.

That account, and others that followed, made only passing mention of the forty-five aspiring female scientists who spent a formative period in the Curie lab. Drawn, as Marie herself was, to the mystery of radioactivity, and heedless of its dangers, they joined in discoveries, tested the power of radiation to treat disease, and explored the unexpected world inside the atom as a source of limitless energy. Several returned to their countries of origin to become the first female professors there, or the first faculty to teach the new science of radioactivity.

Given the social restrictions and expectations of their milieux, some Curie protégées abandoned their careers when they married. Others rejected marriage in order to pursue their research. A few managed to combine the two. Those who befriended one another at the lab later banded together in an international society devoted to furthering educational and professional opportunities for women. Long after their sojourns in Paris, they returned again and again to a memory of some small moment in Mme. Curie’s company—her habit, say, of rubbing the tips of her radium-numbed fingers against her thumb, or the way a smile would sometimes light her sad face and render her suddenly beautiful.