Chapter Twenty-Three

ALICJA (Polonium)

IRÈNE WAS IN LOVE. One morning at breakfast with her mother and sister, early in 1926, she announced her intention to marry Frédéric Joliot. She believed the harmony they had achieved as lab partners, despite their different temperaments, promised equal compatibility as husband and wife. Her memories of her own parents’ union offered the perfect model for her mental picture of married life.

Marie, who relished the constant companionship of her daughters, tried to put the best face on Irène’s decision. At least the impending marriage would not carry her off to some distant country, but only as far as another neighborhood of Paris. That was a comfort. Marie would still see her in the lab almost every day. And nothing needed to change immediately. For now, Frédéric remained Irène’s subordinate, still working toward his doctoral degree. Anything might happen to alter the course of events.

“Chère Mé,” the postcard from the ski resort at Megève began, dated February 19, 1926, in the not yet familiar hand of Frédéric Joliot. “Irène and Ève are in perfect health,” he beamed, “and comport themselves valiantly over the frozen snow. Ève in particular wins admiration for her first attempts. We are gathering our strength and thinking often of the laboratory and the work that awaits our return. We send you our love.” It was signed “Fred” and Irène.

The pace of the engagement had accelerated. Marie voiced no objections, though according to Ève, she “tried in vain to conceal her inner dismay.”

While Irène was away, Marie walked home from the lab on the arm of Alicja Dorabialska, a new independent researcher she had personally recruited. Alicja was the same age as Irène but had grown up more like Marie, in a proudly Polish family chafing under Russian rule in Sosnowiec. As a child, Alicja had heard tales of Mme. Sklodowska Curie that inspired her to become a scientist herself. Fortunately, times had changed enough in Poland for Alicja to earn an advanced degree in organic chemistry from the Warsaw University of Technology. She had been living in Warsaw, working at the Institute of Chemistry, when Madame paid a state visit in 1923 to mark the twenty-fifth anniversary of the discovery of polonium and radium. Their chance meeting precipitated an invitation to the Radium Institute, and now their evening strolls from the rue Pierre-Curie to the Île Saint-Louis gave them the privacy to converse in dialect.

At the lab Alicja collaborated with Dragolijub Yovanovitch in observations of the energy release from chemical reactions involving radioelements. Marie was writing a detailed summary for a Polish scientific journal about the chemistry of polonium—everything from the earliest investigations of the element’s behavior to the methods for obtaining it, the results of recent experiments conducted at the Curie lab, and her interpretation of those results.

One could still extract polonium from mineral ore, as she and Pierre had done early on, but nowadays it was possible to mine polonium from used ampoules of therapeutic radon. Doctors and hospitals had no further use for these items once the encapsulated radon gas had exhausted itself in treating patients’ tumors. Although the radon was gone, along with its short-lived daughters, a valuable residue of long-lasting breakdown products survived inside the ampoule. These included radium F, otherwise known as polonium, and an accumulation of radium D, a long-lived radioactive isotope of lead that would go on generating polonium for years to come.

Radon’s decay gave rise to polonium three successive times in the cascade of transmutations that ended at ordinary—or nonradioactive—lead. Short-lived radium A showed up first, followed several stages later by the even shorter-lived radium C-prime, and finally the relatively stable radium F, with its 140-day half-life. Repeat appearances of the same element in the family genealogy illustrated the “laws of displacement” governing all radioactive decay. Every transformation “displaced” an element from one box to another on the checkerboard grid of the periodic table. When an atom of radium, for example, released an alpha particle, it lost two positive charges and transmuted to radon, two boxes to the left. Radon, too, decayed by alpha emission, to become polonium, another two boxes to the left. But beta emission worked in reverse: An atom that released a beta particle lost a negative charge of minus-one, or, said another way, it gained one unit of positive charge, and moved one box to the right. Thus, the direction and magnitude of change depended on the type of particle emitted at each stage. It was still not clear to anyone how a negatively charged beta particle could emerge from the hotbed of positivity in the atomic nucleus, but somehow it did, and several physicists had tendered their explanations.

The combination of alpha- and beta-type transformations caused the line of descent from atomic number 92 (uranium) to atomic number 82 (lead) to zigzag back and forth instead of following a straight path. As in the expression “two steps forward, one step back,” two successive beta emissions followed by one alpha emission would render an atom an isotope of its ancestor, landing it back in its grandparent’s place on the periodic table.

The serial displacements of the uranium family coexisted with those of the actinium family and the thorium family, creating a bustle of to-and-fro activity across the board in the uranium-to-lead zone. Strangely, none of the progeny ever settled in the still-empty space at number 87 on the periodic table, between radium and radon. Nor was there an occupant for the number 85 place, between radon and polonium. Perhaps these two unknown elements—sure to be radioelements—had already manifested at the Laboratoire Curie but passed through so quickly, on account of ultra-brief half-lives, that no one had noticed them.

IN JUNE 1926, after Frédéric discussed the wedding plans with his mother, Marie asked Emilie Roederer Joliot to lunch with her at home. They spoke of their children—Mme. Joliot had borne six but lost two in infancy and a third son in the war—all afternoon. Each widow made a good impression on the other, as expected. On the twentieth, Irène lunched with Mme. Joliot, who pronounced her “charming with us and affectionate with Fred.” Ève met Frédéric’s sisters, Jeanne and Marguerite, at a family dinner held in the Joliot apartment on the avenue d’Orléans to celebrate the betrothal day, June 24. Days later, Marie took Irène to Brazil.

The University of Rio de Janeiro had invited Mme. Curie to give a series of lectures on radioactivity. Marie, who routinely accommodated foreign radioactivists in her lab, recognized a parallel need to deliver her knowledge directly to scientists abroad. She chose Irène to travel with her not only as a traveling companion, and not just to test the fiancée bond Irène had forged with Frédéric, but as an essential assistant and demonstrator in at least a dozen formal presentations. This might be the last trip they would ever take together, just the two of them. They sailed from Marseilles on June 30.

“The cabin is airy and comfortable,” Marie wrote from the Pincio to the daughter left at home, “but there’s no hot water in the bath. We may be able to carry some down in jugs, although this possibility is limited by the steepness of the final staircase. Apart from that, we are well situated and the boat is very steady.” They were coasting along eastern Spain, and she planned to post her letter at the stop in Valencia. “The food is good, rather too much of it, though, which enables us to skip the buffet items most likely to spoil in warm weather, such as meats and eggs.” After leaving the last Spanish port, they encountered no other vessels during the two weeks their ship plied west and south across the empty, open ocean. Their shadows shrank to nothing under the high sun of the tropics. The nights filled with stars arranged in novel constellations.

“We are in sight of the coast of Brazil and should reach Rio around noon,” she told Ève on July 15. Even before she and Irène could disembark at Guanabara Bay, a welcoming party motored out to greet them in a launch bedecked with flowers. The dignitaries aboard included the French ambassador, the rector and several professors from the university, and members of a committee representing the women of Brazil.

Once landed with Irène in their well-appointed hotel room, Marie found a nearby beach where they could swim and sunbathe early in the morning, before reporting to the university lecture hall. Their Brazilian hostesses accompanied them to official entertainments, and happily led them on recreational walks and drives in the hills above the noisy city, where the visitors marveled at orange and banana trees and great green expanses of utterly unfamiliar plants. Some of their congenial new friends were scientists in their own right, others active in government, and all supported the country’s nascent suffragist movement, the Brazilian Federation for Female Progress.

Irène wrote to Frédéric every day. He was not as frequent or voluble a correspondent as she, but clear in communicating how much he missed her. “I go to the laboratory, and it is a sham not to find you there,” he said. “I shall not return to it with any happiness until you are there again.”

After Rio, Marie and Irène gave further presentations in São Paulo and at the University of Minas Gerais in Belo Horizonte, the site of a medical school with a radium institute. They received several pressing invitations to lecture and teach in Argentina as well, but Marie refused these. She did not want to extend the already lengthy South American tour, partly because the shorter days and colder temperatures in Buenos Aires, where winter now prevailed, would deny her the dose of sunshine and warmth she required for her health. Moreover, it was high time to reunite the young lovers.

As soon as Irène returned in September, she initiated Frédéric in the pleasures of l’Arcouest. The rented cottage that defined summertime for her now belonged to the Curies. Marie purchased it in 1924 with part of her government pension, and then acquired a second property—a plot of vacant land closer to the beach and the dock—in 1925. If Frédéric fit in with the l’Arcouest community as comfortably as Irène hoped, then she and he might build their own place someday. Luckily, Frédéric’s skill as a fisherman endeared him to the Brittany locals and summer folk alike.

The wedding of Irène and Frédéric, like the wedding of Marie and Pierre, was a small civil service. It took place on Saturday morning, October 9, in the municipal offices of Paris’s fourth arrondissement, attended only by immediate family and closest friends. A luncheon chez Marie followed. That afternoon, instead of bicycling off on a honeymoon, the newlyweds resumed their experiments in the lab. The next day, when Marie departed for Denmark on another round of lectures, Frédéric moved into Irène’s room in the all-female lair on the quai de Béthune.

The start of the new academic year brought Irène the first foreign scientist who had come expressly to study under her. In the past Irène had tutored any number of visitors and newcomers, notably Fred, but none of them had sought her out. Hungarian-born Erzsébet Róna, an experienced radioactivist with the Vienna Radium Institute, had requested specific instruction in Irène’s techniques for separating, purifying, and concentrating polonium. Mlle. Róna shadowed her younger mentor for two months to gain mastery, and left Paris with a modicum of polonium as a parting gift from the Curies.

In December Irène heard from her previous mentee and collaborator Nobuo Yamada. He had been back in Japan just two weeks, his letter said, when he suddenly fainted. Since then a strange malaise had confined him to bed. “The cause of the illness still isn’t clear,” he wrote, though he assumed it had to do with radioactivity exposure. “It is certain that I was very tired after the long stay abroad, but also there was a poisoning from the emanations.” This was his own diagnosis, based on his symptoms of chronic stomach distress and crippling fatigue.

In Tokyo, where Yamada lay ill, doctors still had little or no experience with radioelements, either as boons or as threats to health, and not a single article about radium poisoning could be found in the Japanese medical literature. Therefore, Yamada hoped Irène could provide such information from other sources, allowing him to compare the progress of his disease with those reports.

Expressing her concern, Irène did her best to comply.