- Glenda Cooper reviews Dava Sobel’s new biography of Marie Curie, The Elements of Marie Curie
THE ELEMENTS OF MARIE CURIE: HOW THE GLOW OF RADIUM LIT A PATH FOR WOMEN IN SCIENCE by Dava Sobel (4th Estate £22, 336pp)
The Elements of Marie Curie is available now from the Mail Bookshop
When Marie Curie wins her second Nobel Prize – the first person to do so, and the only Nobel laureate still to have been awarded the prize in two different branches of science – you’d expect her to be feted at the ceremony in Sweden.
Far from it – instead the Nobel committee tries to persuade her to stay away from the annual black-tie celebration followed by a sumptuous dinner.
Her crime? The Press have just revealed her relationship with the scientist Paul Langevin (he, of course, suffers no criticism despite the fact he was the one who was married, while she was widowed).
Curie refused to back down and attends the prestigious event. ‘I believe,’ she tells the committee, ‘there is no connection between my scientific work and the facts of private life’.
But as Dava Sobel outlines in her new book, the scientific community and the world at large disagreed: a woman scientist was judged differently. And so rather than tell a conventional life story, Sobel, the best-selling author of Longitude and Galileo’s Daughter, decides to focus on the role that gender played in Curie’s life and, in particular, the fact 45 aspiring female scientists spent time in the Curies’ lab.
It is a meditation on the struggle that different women have faced to be recognised as scientists. And also, what a difference it makes when men support them.
Still, there is plenty of interesting biography in here, explaining how a Polish governess named Marya Sklodowska transformed herself into a French physicist named Marie Curie.
The Sklodowskas were a high-achieving family – Marie’s parents were teachers, Marie, her sister Bronya and brother Jozef all finished top of their class at school and then attended a clandestine ‘Flying University’ – so-called because classes moved from place to place to avoid detection by the Russians at that time ruling Poland.
Marie and Bronya cooked up a plan: she would work as a governess to support her sister’s medical studies in France; once Bronya had qualified she would support Marie in the Sorbonne for her scientific studies.
There, in Paris, the young Marie’s career takes off: she’s placed first in her class of more than 2,000 (only 23 of whom are women), wins a scholarship and meets a young man studying in a similar area called Pierre Curie.
Neither of them was looking for love but the marriage was a huge success.
Modern Marriage: Marie and her husband Pierre Curie
What’s remarkable here is quite how ahead of their time the Curie men were. Pierre offers to relocate to Poland for Marie, and he insists she is named in their Nobel Prize for Physics citation in 1903 for the discovery of radioactivity. The committee wanted to give it just to him. Even his father moves in to babysit their daughters Irene and Eve so Marie could continue working at the lab.
The Curies’ behaviour is completely at odds with the sexism that Marie and the young female scientists she worked with regularly encounter. As well as the fuss over her second Nobel Prize (she wins the second for discovering radium and polonium, as well as determining radium’s atomic weight) – the Royal Society won’t grant her a fellowship because she is a ‘wife’.
The prestigious French Académie des Sciences does not want to award her a place as a woman because of ‘immutable tradition’. When she goes to America on tour, at the height of her fame in 1921, the director of Yale’s chemical laboratory, Bertram Boltwood, patronisingly describes her as ‘quite keen on scientific matters . . . I felt sorry for the poor old girl, she was a distinctly pathetic figure’.
Sobel chooses to examine around half of the female scientists who passed through the Curie lab – in an ironic visual metaphor, the lab was so makeshift (described by one observer as a ‘cross between a stable and a potato cellar’) that it had an actual glass ceiling.
These include names such as Harriet Brooks, the first Canadian female nuclear physicist, Ellen Gleditsch from Norway, who established the half-life of radium, and Sybil Leslie, a working-class girl from Yorkshire, who was put in charge of a British government lab in Liverpool during the First World War after her work on manufacturing explosives.
Professor Ellen Gleditsch established the half-life of radium
Each one gets a chapter named after her and a corresponding element in the periodic table, although for many the detail is brief. Curie dominates in this book, just as she has in public consciousness ever since, despite Sobel’s best efforts.
The subtitle of the book is How The Glow Of Radium Lit A Path For Women In Science. And certainly, it’s an eyeopener as to just how crucial some of these women were in pioneering work around radioactivity.
But the path wasn’t one that opened up readily: Brooks decides that science isn’t compatible with marriage and gives up; even though Gleditsch became a university professor in Norway, the institution would not grant her lab space or tenure for years.
As expected from a Pulitzer Prize finalist, Sobel writes beautifully and with clarity about the science that Curie specialised in, making clear the achievements that her lab brought about in the discovery of polonium and radium.
And yet despite the restrictions that women still face, the book ends on a note of hope. While Irene, her daughter, became the second woman to win a Nobel Prize for chemistry, another protégé has the honour of having the final chapter named after her.
Marguerite Perey joined Curie’s Radium Institute in 1929 and went on to discover the element francium. Three decades later, she became the first woman admitted to the Académie des Sciences – succeeding where her mentor was kept out. ‘Everything I have done,’ she once declared. ‘I owe to Marie Curie.’