Book review: The world is not short of biographies of Marie Curie, but American science writer Dava Sobel has taken a new approach. In her engaging account of the physicist’s turbulent life, she focuses on her legacy of encouraging other women into science.
The book is cleverly structured. Each chapter is assigned a chemical element or material and the name of the person whose work either advanced knowledge of that substance or narrowed Curie’s focus on it. This allows Sobel to trace Curie’s life and its major milestones chronologically, introducing a new player with each chapter.
Curie was a contemporary of some of the best-known male scientists – Ernest Rutherford, Albert Einstein and Max Planck, to name just a few – and they all feature in the book. But most chapters headline young women who chose Curie’s lab to hone their skills in working with radioactive elements. The two exceptions are dedicated to Curie’s husband, Pierre, and André-Louis Debierne, who later stepped up to oversee her institute when she became too unwell.
Even though it’s now more than 120 years since Curie became the first woman to be awarded a Nobel prize (her first was in physics, in 1903, shared with Pierre Curie and Henri Becquerel for their research into radioactive decay), she remains the most widely recognised female scientist. Sobel acknowledges this as a reason for writing another biography and as motivation to continue her trademark approach to writing about science by highlighting women whose contributions and discoveries remain overlooked – one used convincingly in her earlier book, The Glass Universe.
Even though many of Curie’s female protégés eventually moved on to professorships and noteworthy achievements in their own right, none have become well known, except perhaps for Curie’s elder daughter Irène, who received her own Nobel Prize in 1935.
Curie was, of course, overshadowed during the early years of her work. Born in 1867 in Warsaw as Maria Salomea Skłodowska, she had to study secretly at the clandestine Flying University, where a group of young women moved between undisclosed venues to learn about physics and maths.
Few universities accepted women at the time. The Sorbonne in Paris was one, but it took Curie years to make enough money to afford the move. She came top of her class and a scholarship allowed her to continue her studies, which eventually turned to the “emanations” from uranium.
Paris is also where she met her future husband, with whom she collaborated closely until his death in a carriage accident only 11 years into their marriage. It was during these intense years that she discovered two new radioactive elements, radium and polonium, and coined the term radioactivity.
In the process, she upended contemporary thinking about elements as immutable and atoms as indivisible. The periodic table was thought to be fixed and the idea that elements could transmutate and become something new still had a whiff of alchemy.
In a way, it wasn’t until after Pierre’s untimely death that Curie gained full respect within the science community. But then she quickly lost much of it again when she had an affair with the married physicist Paul Langevin and took disproportionate blame for the scandal. She faced a barrage of misogynistic and xenophobic attacks and was forced into hiding with her two young daughters. It took World War I, during which Curie drove X-ray units to the battlefields, to restore her reputation.
Throughout all of this, Curie’s lab nurtured young female scientists who came from different parts of Europe to work with her. Each young woman was exceptional and fought her own battles to get a foothold in a male-dominated area of science. Sobel’s storytelling is engaging and her research exquisitely detailed (she even lists the entire menu served at Curie’s second Nobel Prize ceremony in 1913). But in many of the book’s chapter vignettes, science dominates and the inner lives of these women remain elusive. The Canadian physicist Harriet Brooks stands out an as example of a life story left hanging. She quit Curie’s lab and later undermined her grieving mentor by publicly suggesting that her output had diminished without Pierre. What motivated Brooks remains an open question.
How Curie herself coped with the most difficult experiences in her life – losing her mother to tuberculosis when she was 10, miscarriage, the death of her husband, being overlooked for academic society memberships, her own ill health – also feels under-explored, except for short excerpts from her journals and letters.
Mixing a major biography with several shorter ones adds pace and rhythm to the narrative and, combined with Sobel’s elegant prose, produces a very readable historical account, but some lives remain merely sketches.
One of the most touching passages comes right at the end. A list of “radioactivists” simply notes everyone’s birth and death dates, main achievements and cause of death – a stark reminder that Curie and many other women paid the ultimate price for their radioactive research.
