Chapter Thirty

ÈVE (Radiophosphorus)

“THE JOLIOTS have completed important new work on a novel phenomenon they discovered in radioactivity,” Marie wrote right away to Ève, who was vacationing in Switzerland. “They are on a good path to great success, and they have surely earned it through tremendous effort. I’ll explain what they did when you get back, as it’s too much to describe in a letter.”

The first time through, Irène and Frédéric had skipped a step. In their presentation to the Solvay Council, they claimed that alpha-bombarded aluminum, element number 13 on the periodic table, had transformed directly into silicon, element number 14, with the release of a proton or of a neutron and a positron. But as the couple came to realize in retrials, the changes happened in two phases. First the aluminum nucleus, by absorbing the alpha particle, transmuted to phosphorus, element number 15. And an instant later the new phosphorus atom—a previously unknown and radioactive isotope of phosphorus—decayed to silicon.

The unexpected, unstable interim phosphorus isotope proved itself the chemical twin of familiar phosphorus by the way it reacted with a solution of acids and zirconium salts. This assay needed to be performed rapidly, given the brief half-life of radiophosphorus, which Frédéric and Irène determined by the clicks of a Geiger counter to be three minutes and fifteen seconds.

Having captured one new radioisotope, the couple tried to create others in the same way. By bombarding boron with alpha particles, they produced a short-lived new radioactive isotope of nitrogen. Bombarding magnesium yielded radiosilicon—a third new radioisotope never seen in nature. It seemed that their technique would allow them to artificially inseminate almost any element with the awesome power of radioactivity.

The ability to fashion radioisotopes from common materials, instead of extracting traces of rare ones from tons of exotic ores, suggested crucial practical applications. In tumor treatment, for example, lab-crafted radioisotopes could do their assigned work and decay directly to a stable element—without generating a long and dangerous train of radioactive daughter products. In basic research, tailor-made radioactive markers could be attached as tags to essential nutrients or disease organisms to reveal their pathways through the bodies of animals and plants. A myriad of future uses—perhaps a whole new field of physics—might emerge, but here and now, in mid-January 1934, before anyone outside the family had an inkling of what the two of them had done, the thing was beautiful in itself. After six years of collaboration, they had achieved their life-changing, career-defining breakthrough.

Frédéric and Irène presented one of their new radioisotopes to Marie as though it were a golden trophy or a magic ring.

“I can still see her,” Frédéric recalled years later, “taking between her fingers, burnt and scarred by radium, the small tube containing the feebly active material. To check what we had told her, she placed it near a Geiger counter to hear the clicks given off by the rate meter. This was without doubt the last great satisfaction of her life.”

WHENEVER MARIE’S ongoing work with the actinium family kept her at the lab past the dinner hour, she satisfied herself with a piece of bread or a few cookies and a glass of tea warmed on a hotplate, as she had done in her student days. At sixty-six she voiced the same complaints that plagued many people her age—rheumatism in her shoulder, ringing in her ears—and a few that were peculiar to persons in her line of work, such as abnormal blood counts. Sometime soon, with Ève’s help and decorating advice, she intended to move out of the great, echoey apartment on the quai de Béthune, into smaller, more modern quarters in a new building near the university. She also wanted to build a little villa on some land she had bought in Sceaux. As she told Bronya, “I feel the need of a house with a garden more and more, and ardently hope that this plan will succeed.”

At Easter Marie invited Bronya to Paris, and also to drive with her to Cavalaire, as they had meant to do the previous year—before the League of Nations summoned Marie to Madrid. By the time the sisters reached the vacation house far to the south, Marie felt tired and depressed, and feared an attack of bronchitis coming on. But it was only a cold, and she had Bronya there to nurse her, and the fine weather made the trip worthwhile.

She was still running a slight fever weeks later when she hugged Bronya goodbye in Paris at the Gare du Nord. Even so, she returned to work at the institute, and to the editing of her book, until the late afternoon in May when her persistent fever and increasing chills sent her home to bed.

For the next several weeks Marie roused herself only to make doctor visits. At length Ève suggested a rest at a sanitarium, and selected Sancellemoz in the Haute-Savoie region of southeastern France. The plan was for Ève to accompany her mother on the journey and stay with her at Sancellemoz for most of July. Next the Sklodowski siblings would visit by turns, and then Irène would spend the month of August with her. By autumn Marie would be well.

A sudden worsening of her condition made the train ride to Saint-Gervais a torture for her, and she collapsed upon arrival at the sanitarium. Her fever had reached 104 degrees. Over the next few days, both her red- and white-blood-cell counts plummeted. In lieu of futile blood transfusions, her attending physicians gave her medications to keep her calm and help her sleep. Through the final night of Marie’s life, Ève held one of her hands and Dr. Pierre Lowys held the other. The news of her death, at dawn, traveled swiftly around the world.

“Mme. Pierre Curie died at Sancellemoz on July 4, 1934,” sanitarium director Dr. François Tobé reported early that morning. “The disease was an aplastic pernicious anemia of rapid, feverish development. The bone marrow did not react, probably because it had been injured by a long accumulation of radiation.”

A lengthy obituary appeared in the New York Times under the headline MME. CURIE IS DEAD; MARTYR TO SCIENCE. After giving the details of her demise, the article noted that “few persons contributed more to the general welfare of mankind and to the advancement of science than the modest, self-effacing woman whom the world knew as Mme. Curie. Her epoch-making discoveries of polonium and radium, the subsequent honors that were bestowed upon her—she was the only person to receive two Nobel Prizes—and the fortunes that could have been hers had she wanted them did not change her mode of life. She remained a worker in the cause of science, preferring her laboratory to a great social place in the sun … And thus she not only conquered great secrets of science but the hearts of the people the world over.”

IRÈNE AND ÈVE, knowing their mother’s wishes, invited only friends and family, including the laboratory family, to the private funeral in Sceaux on Friday, July 6. Marie wanted to be buried as she had lived—simply, near Pierre, and with no undue fanfare. Józef and Bronya came from Warsaw, each bearing a handful of Polish soil to drop into the grave.

In the days that followed, André Debierne quietly succeeded Marie as director of the Laboratoire Curie, and Irène assumed his previous role—the role that had originally belonged to Marie—as chef de travaux.

The radium standard that Mme. Curie created in 1911 retired from world service at the time of her death. Although the synchronous events were unrelated, both could be laid to radioactivity. In Marie’s body, the years of radioactivity exposure—and X-ray exposure—had halted the production of red blood cells. In the sealed glass tube containing the international radium standard, helium and chlorine gas had accumulated as a consequence of radioactive decay, till scientists feared the mounting gas pressure might explode the vessel’s fragile walls.

The book that Marie struggled to finish before she died, titled simply Radioactivité, was completed by Irène and Frédéric and published in two volumes in 1935. That same year Irène became the second woman to win the Nobel Prize in Chemistry.

Irène remembered her earlier visit to Stockholm, as a teenager drafted to stand by her at-once disgraced and honored mother. This time she and her husband bowed together before the Swedish king, accepting the joint award “for their synthesis of new radioactive elements.” At the same ceremony, their former rival James Chadwick received the Physics prize for his discovery of the neutron.

Just as Irène and Frédéric had shared the work that led to this stellar recognition, they divided the delivery of the Nobel lecture between them. She spoke first, explaining the physics of what they had done, followed by his account of the chemistry.

Irène Curie and Frédéric Joliot

Photo Henri Manuel. Musée Curie (coll. ACJC)

Recalling her parents and citing them by name, Irène reminded the Stockholm audience of the “immense consequences in the knowledge of the structure of matter” that radioactivity had wrought. “Nevertheless,” she said, “radioactivity remained a property exclusively associated with some thirty substances existing naturally. The artificial creation of radioelements opens a new field to the science of radioactivity, and so provides an extension of the work of Pierre and Marie Curie.”

At present, Frédéric pointed out, “we know how to synthesize more than fifty new radioelements—a number already greater than that of the natural radioelements found in the earth’s crust. It was indeed a great source of satisfaction for our late teacher, Marie Curie, to have witnessed this lengthening of the list of radioelements, which she had the glory, in company with Pierre Curie, of beginning.”

Irène and Frédéric built a house on the lot in Sceaux where Marie had fancied living out her old age as a gardener. Irène designed the home with a huge open room. Here friends, mostly fellow scientists, gathered on Sunday afternoons in a repetition of the salons her parents had hosted long ago.

In 1936 Irène accepted a cabinet position as undersecretary of state for scientific research. She held the rare distinction of being one of only three women selected to serve the newly installed government of the Popular Front—at a time when the women of France did not yet have the right to vote. She agreed to stay at the post for just three months that summer, however, because she believed other scientists were more qualified than she to hold a portfolio, while very few could fulfill her role as a researcher and teacher of radioactivity.

Irène’s poor health consigned her to spend the early months of the Second World War at Clairvivre, a tuberculosis sanitarium near Périgueux. She had with her Marie’s gram of radium for safekeeping. Hélène and Pierre stayed at l’Arcouest in the care of their Polish cousin Elzbieta Szyler, while Frédéric carried out dangerous underground activities with the Résistance. These included the preparation of Molotov cocktails and other homemade explosives in his laboratory at the Collège de France. In 1944 he managed to get his family safely to Switzerland, and also to help free Paul Langevin from house arrest in Troyes. At the end of the war, Frédéric was made a commander of the Legion of Honor for his military services, awarded the Croix de Guerre, and appointed director of the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique. Having opposed the employment of nuclear power in weaponry, Irène and Frédéric promoted its peaceful uses for the rest of their lives.

Irène advanced to the directorship of the Laboratoire Curie in 1946, when André Debierne retired. She became known, in her turn, as la patronne, but she looked beyond the grounds of the Radium Institute in choosing Orsay as the site of a major new center for nuclear physics research.

In the early 1950s, while the Orsay laboratories were under construction, Irène presented herself repeatedly as a candidate for election to the Académie des Sciences. Frédéric had become an Académicien in 1946, but despite Irène’s scientific merit and her perseverance, she failed to overturn the institution’s nearly three-century tradition of barring women.

The planned new Institute of Nuclear Physics at Orsay, about sixteen miles southwest of Paris, still resembled a rough construction site when Irène died in 1956. Its direction, like that of the Laboratoire Curie, was tied to the faculty chair of radioactivity that she had held for ten years. Frédéric sought a replacement for her, but there was no one capable or willing—except Frédéric himself. Just as the grieving Mme. Curie had consented, in 1906, to assume the post vacated by her husband, Frédéric took up Irène’s title and duties. He found time and strength enough to complete the building project before his own death two years later.

ÈVE CURIE APPROACHED the duty of writing her mother’s biography with the same dogged, solitary dedication that had seen her through years of patient piano practice. The memory of reading Colette’s Sido challenged Ève to achieve a portrait of her own mother that would touch others’ hearts. “There are, in the life of Marie Curie,” her book begins, “so many great moments that one is tempted to tell her story as a legend.”

Madame Curie, published in 1938 in French (1939 in English), established Ève’s reputation as a writer. The book became a bestseller, won a National Book Award in the United States, and inspired a Hollywood film, starring the glamorous Greer Garson as Marie.

Ève, who had been too young to follow her mother and sister to the Western Front, left Nazi-occupied France during World War II to join the Free French Forces in England under General Charles de Gaulle. The Vichy government revoked her citizenship and confiscated her property, including Marie’s vacation home in Cavalaire.

In November 1941, as a regular contributor to the New York Herald Tribune, Ève embarked on a globe-circling journey to report on wartime conditions. She got close to the front lines in Libya, Burma, and the Soviet Union. In Iran, she met the newly installed Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi and the prime minister of Poland in exile, Wladyslaw Sikorski. In India she interviewed Jawaharlal Nehru and Mahatma Gandhi; in China, Chiang Kai-shek and Zhou Enlai. Early on, the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor nixed the Pacific leg of her itinerary, so she doubled back to New York five months and forty thousand miles later via South America, instead of flying from Singapore to San Francisco as planned.

She collected her articles in a second book, Journey Among Warriors, which was published in the United States and England in 1943. Returning to Europe, Ève volunteered with the women’s medical corps for the Italian Campaign. In August 1944, having won promotion to the rank of lieutenant in the Free French First Armored Division, she participated in the liberation of Paris and was decorated with the Croix de Guerre.

Ève Curie

Sueddeutsche Zeitung Photo / Alamy Stock Photo

While working in the early 1950s as special advisor to Hastings Lionel Ismay, the first secretary general of NATO, Ève met and married American diplomat Henry Richardson Labouisse Jr., and became a US citizen in 1958. For decades she had joked about being the only member of her family never to win a Nobel Prize. Her self-deprecating quip resounded in 1965, when she accompanied her husband to Oslo to accept the Nobel Peace Prize in his role as executive director of UNICEF, the United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund. Over the next fifteen years, Ève, who had no children of her own, traveled alongside Henry as unofficial “First Lady of UNICEF” to aid mothers and babies in scores of countries.

IN 1995, THE REMAINS of Marie and Pierre Curie were exhumed and transferred to an honored place in the Panthéon, the great domed shrine where French heroes such as Voltaire and Rousseau are interred. As had often been the case during her lifetime, Mme. Curie was the first woman accorded this ultimate tribute.

Ève, a widow of ninety at the time of the Panthéon ceremony, flew from her home in New York to take part in the public procession, beside French president François Mitterrand and Polish president Lech Walesa.

One wonders what Marie herself would have thought of her apotheosis, given that she forbade pomp at her own funeral, and considering how carefully she had curated the placement of bodies in the family burial plot—to the extent of raising Pierre’s coffin after Dr. Eugène Curie died, so that the husbands and wives could be reunited.

The veneration of Mme. Curie’s mortal remains led to several retellings of her life story. At the end of the twentieth century, documents of hers that had long been deemed too personal, such as her grief journal, or too radioactive, such as her lab notebooks, were made available to scholars. By then a new coda capped the great scientist’s biography: radium, the element that defined her career—the miracle elixir seen for decades as the cure for cancer—lost its luster due to its undeniable danger. What had once been the Earth’s most costly, most sought-after substance was reclassified as toxic waste, and traditional curietherapy yielded to short-lived artificial radionuclides made possible by the work of Irène and Frédéric Joliot-Curie.

Another coda to Marie Curie’s story concerns the role she continues to play as iconic female scientist. By some lights she sets a dauntingly high standard—as though success for a woman in science requires at least two major discoveries deserving of two Nobel Prizes. But she herself stood ever ready to explore physics with children, to train young ladies how to teach science to girls, to make X-ray technicians out of women with rudimentary schooling, and to open her laboratory to those who chose to join her in the pursuit of science as a way of life. In this spirit, she inspires followers to seek the happiness she found while pacing near the stove in the old shed, trying to figure out how Nature works.