Marie Curie and Irène Joliot-Curie

IRÈNE JOLIOT-CURIE AND MARIE CURIE

Chelsea

In 1863, a few years before Marie Curie was born in Warsaw (in what is today Poland but was then a part of the Russian Empire), the country’s Ministry of Education formally banned women from enrolling in universities. But Marie, born Maria Skłodowska, was consistently the first in her class at school and was determined to pursue a university education.

Marie excelled in the face of tragedy. During her childhood, her oldest sister died of typhus, her mother died of tuberculosis, and her father lost his job because of his pro-Polish beliefs. After she graduated from high school, Marie attended “The Flying University,” a series of women-only underground classes and lectures, including in math and science, which moved from private home to private home to evade the authorities. While pursuing her studies in secret, Marie worked as a teacher and governess to support herself and to help her older sister afford medical school in Paris.

“Unknown in Paris, I was lost in the great city, but the feeling of living there alone, taking care of myself without any aid, did not depress me. If sometimes I felt lonesome, my usual state of mind was one of calm and great moral satisfaction.”

—MARIE CURIE

In 1891, at the age of twenty-four, Marie moved to Paris and began studying physical sciences (physics) and math at the Sorbonne, one of France’s most prestigious universities. While she received some support from her sister and, later, a scholarship, she largely supported herself, living without heat in the winters, eating a sparse diet, and tutoring in the evenings, all while going to school and studying during the day. Her diligence paid off. She placed first in her class for physical sciences and second in math and began working in a laboratory while still a student.

In 1894, while looking for lab space for her experiments on the magnetic properties of different types of steel, Marie met Professor Pierre Curie. Despite a promising early working relationship, Marie returned to Poland that summer to visit her family and apply for a job at Kraków University. Her application was rejected because of her gender. The ban on women students in Poland apparently extended to women faculty, too.

Back in Paris, Marie began exploring a series of research questions with Pierre and on her own that would define—and ultimately end—her life. Those experiments would also bring her and Pierre closer together. Pierre wrote letters to Marie, overflowing not with romantic prose but with his aspirations for all the scientific work he hoped the two of them could accomplish together. That didn’t bother Marie: “[F]or Pierre Curie there was only one way of looking at the future,” she wrote later. “He had dedicated his life to his dream of science: he felt the need of a companion who could live his dream with him.” They would marry in 1895, with Marie wearing her only dress: the lab dress she wore every day. I’ve always loved that they met thanks to her work on magnetism.

In 1897, after analyzing her experiments’ results, Marie theorized that uranium emits particle rays that come not from an external energy source but from the element’s atomic structure. She named this phenomenon “radioactivity.” It would later form the basis of atomic physics and lead to Pierre working full-time to support Marie’s research. Marie and Pierre later isolated a new radioactive element, which they named polonium, after Poland. They then discovered another new radioactive element, radium, which they recognized destroyed tumor-producing cells more quickly than other healthy cells. All of this work, the dozens of published scientific papers that emerged from it, and Marie’s first Nobel Prize (in physics), shared with Pierre and scientist Henri Becquerel for their work on radioactivity, occurred within a decade. Marie was the first woman to receive a Nobel. I first learned about Marie when, as a kid, I asked my mom which women had won a Nobel, then promptly looked her up in the Encyclopaedia Britannica I’d gotten for Christmas a couple of years earlier.

“Nothing in life is to be feared; it is only to be understood.”

—MARIE CURIE

While engaged in the research that the Nobel Committee cited in her award, Marie had her two daughters, Irène and Ève. “It became a serious problem how to take care of our little Irène and of our home without giving up my scientific work,” she wrote later. “Such a renunciation would have been very painful to me, and my husband would not even think of it; he used to say that he got a wife made expressly for him to share all his preoccupations. Neither of us would contemplate abandoning what was so precious to both.” Like many other women of privilege throughout the ages, she got some relief by hiring a housekeeper.

Marie took on more work to support her family. She began teaching at the prestigious École Normale Supérieure de Jeunes Filles and pioneered a new method of teaching based on experimental demonstrations. In case working multiple jobs wasn’t enough, she oversaw her daughters’ education, homeschooling them as part of a cooperative and also arranging sessions with her students and fellow faculty members. Her daughters were taught by university professors at a young age, at a time when girls were still not permitted to study at universities in many countries around the world. Later, Marie and Irène would collaborate to write the entry on radium for the thirteenth edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. Reading the letters between Marie and her daughters throughout their lives, I am struck by how much joy her daughters brought her. “Dear Irène,” began one response, “I’ve just received your sweet letter of Saturday and I wanted so much to hug you that I almost cried.”

Unlike some historical figures who become famous only after death, Pierre and Marie captured international attention after they won the Nobel for the discovery of radium. For Pierre especially, fame had its highs and lows. “We have been pursued by journalists and photographers from all countries of the world; they have gone even so far as to report the conversation between my daughter and her nurse,” he wrote to a friend.

“It is impossible for me to express the profoundness and importance of the crisis brought into my life by the loss of the one who had been my closest companion and best friend. Crushed by the blow, I did not feel able to face the future. I could not forget, however, what my husband used to sometimes say, that, even deprived of him, I ought to continue my work.”

—MARIE CURIE

Marie and Pierre appreciated the “quiet living, organized according to our desires,” which made it possible for them to pursue their work. “It can be easily understood that there was no place in our life for worldly relations,” Marie wrote. “We saw but a few friends, scientific workers, like ourselves, with whom we talked in our home or in our garden, while I did some sewing for my little girl.” When Pierre died in an accident in 1906, Marie was shocked and devastated. She further immersed herself in the work that she and her husband had started together. “I am working in the laboratory all day long, it is all I can do,” she wrote in her journal. That same year, she was appointed to fill Pierre’s professorship, becoming the first woman to teach at the Sorbonne.

In 1910, Marie finally isolated pure radium, after years of work, and she defined the unit used to measure radioactive emissions, appropriately called the “curie.” For this work, the Nobel Committee awarded Marie her second Nobel Prize, making her the first person ever to receive a Nobel in two separate disciplines: first physics, then chemistry.

Marie’s unprecedented scientific achievements were still insufficient for the all-male membership of the French Académie des Sciences to elect her to their ranks. It wouldn’t be until 1962 that the first woman was elected: a scientist named Marguerite Perey, who had studied under Marie. Marie’s Nobel Prizes also didn’t protect her from xenophobia, sexism, or from the anti-Semitic rumors that claimed she was secretly Jewish. In 1911, Albert Einstein wrote her an encouraging letter that began: “Do not laugh at me for writing you without having anything sensible to say. But I am so enraged by the base manner in which the public is presently daring to concern itself with you that I absolutely must give vent to this feeling.” He concluded by urging her: “If the rabble continues to occupy itself with you, then simply don’t read that hogwash, but rather leave it to the reptile for whom it has been fabricated.”

Marie seemed to take his advice. She didn’t let the critics shake her loyalty to her adopted country of France, where she opened the Radium Institute at the University of Paris, or her home country of Poland, where she would open the Radium Institute in Warsaw in 1932.

After World War I broke out, Marie turned her talents to inventing the first “radiological cars,” or cars containing portable X-ray machines. She hoped her new radiological cars could help battlefield medics and doctors more accurately diagnose injuries and conduct surgeries. After she raised the money needed to produce her new fleet of traveling X-ray machines, called “little Curies,” she and Irène trained woman volunteers to operate them. Marie also learned, in her late forties, to drive a car and be a mechanic so she could operate a little Curie herself. Marie’s traveling X-ray cars inspired similar efforts by different countries’ militaries.

“That one must do some work seriously and must be independent and not merely amuse oneself in life—this our mother has told us always, but never that science was the only career worth following.”

—IRÈNE JOLIOT-CURIE

Although they were already worried about the long-term health effects of X-ray exposure, Marie and Irène clearly determined that their military service was worth the risk. (I hope they informed the more than 150 women they trained throughout the war of these risks so that those women, too, could make a decision about whether or not to drive and operate little Curies.)

After the war, Marie continued her work with radium (and rescued the valuable stash that she had hidden away in a bank vault in Bordeaux in case of German occupation of Paris) and raised money to support her work and that of the radium institutes she had created. Irène returned to her studies, interrupted by the war, focusing on alpha rays emitted by polonium. Her later work with her husband, Frédéric Joliot-Curie (the couple made the decision to hyphenate their last names, an uncommon practice at the time), examined how polonium affected other elements. Like her parents, Irène and her husband worked side by side on their research. Eventually, they artificially created radioactive versions of usually stable elements. In 1935, Irène followed in her parents’ footsteps when the Nobel Committee jointly awarded her and Frédéric the Nobel Prize in chemistry.

“The farther the experiment is from theory, the closer it is to the Nobel Prize.”

—IRÈNE JOLIOT-CURIE

Their work helped drive progress in multiple fields, including in cancer research. But as had been true for her mother, despite her Nobel Prize and many other prestigious recognitions, the Academy of Sciences never admitted Irène. In addition to her contributions to science, she was involved in politics throughout her life—standing up for adequate funding for scientific research, for human rights, and against fascism.

While Marie always believed in the importance of X-rays and the healing properties of radium, both she and Pierre suffered radium burns during their experiments; indeed, sometimes the burns were purposeful parts of the experiments. Marie also often carried test tubes of radium in her pockets for convenience. Marie died in 1934 of aplastic anemia, a blood disease associated with radiation exposure. In 1956, Irène died of leukemia, likely from her decades of work with polonium. Frédéric died two years later of liver disease, also likely caused or exacerbated by his long work in radioactivity. The radiation experiments Marie conducted were so intense, and done without protective equipment (because no one yet knew how necessary it would be), that Marie’s notebooks and papers can still be viewed only by people wearing specially purposed protective gear.

Six decades after her death, Marie’s ashes were enshrined in the Panthéon in Paris; she was the first woman to receive this honor for her own achievements. In her life, Marie was single-minded. She sacrificed much in service of her work: friends, living near her family, her health. In the end, she wrote, “I appreciated the privilege of realizing that our discovery had become a benefit to mankind, not only through its great scientific importance, but also by its power of efficient action against human suffering and terrible disease. This was indeed a splendid reward for our years of hard toil.”