Long before the women who helped win the space race were depicted in the 2016 film “Hidden Figures,” women were making contributions to science that far outpaced the credit they were given for their achievements.
Marie Curie is perhaps the most famous woman to have made a scientific impact in the 20th Century — she was the only woman at the historic first Solvay Conference in 1911 in Brussels, where scientists duked it out over quantum theory and classical physics, and her two Nobel prizes and her work to bring x-rays to the front lines on World War I cemented her legend and legacy.
Pictured Above: Marie Curie (seated second from right) was the only woman invited to participate in the first Solvay Conference of physicists in 1911.
But less often told is the story of how Madame Curie nurtured other women who shared her dedication to science.
South Fork science biographer Dava Sobel recently embarked on just such an experiment with her latest book, “The Elements of Marie Curie: How the Glow of Radium Lit a Path for Women in Science,” published by Grove Atlantic late in 2024.
Ms. Sobel has in the past written well-known biographies of Nicolaus Copernicus and an unknown clockmaker, John Harrison, who postulated the idea of longitude.
But she is no stranger to writing about the worlds of women in science, including “The Glass Universe,” a 2016 work about the women who worked to measure the stars at Harvard University at the turn of the 20th Century, and “Galileo’s Daughter,” about the groundbreaking astronomer’s relationship with his two daughters, who were cloistered nuns.
“Now, I want to tell stories only about women in science,” said Ms. Sobel at a talk on her new book organized by The Hamptons Observatory at the Southampton Arts Center Jan. 13.
While Ms. Sobel said no one in her family discouraged her own interest in science, she “picked up a lot of negativity” toward women in science from the world around her.
The work on “The Glass Universe” and the methods used to measure such vast objects as the stars led the author to search in another direction, into the minute measurements required to find new elements, and the newly discovered rays emanating from them.
“Her lifespan overlapped with a revolution in science, from quantum mechanics to special and general relativity, atomic and nuclear physics,” said Ms. Sobel of Mme. Curie.
Ms. Sobel made clear that, when Marie Curie first found anomalies in the rays emanating from uranium in the lab she shared with her husband, Pierre, it was she who launched the research that would lead to her discovery of polonium and radium, and “Pierre dropped what he was doing and joined her” in the work that would lead to her first Nobel Prize, in physics in 1903, which she shared with Pierre and Antione Becquerel.
That prize was for their study of spontaneous radiation found in pitchblende ore. They believed at the time that the radiation was emanating from two new elements in the ore, which they named polonium, after Mme. Cure’s native Poland, and radium, though they had not yet conclusively proved the existence of those elements.
Long after Pierre’s death — run over by a wagon in the streets of Paris while hurrying home from a 1906 meeting of scientists — Mme. Curie would win her second Nobel Prize, in Chemistry in 1911, for the discovery of polonium and radium. She remains to date just one of five people, and the only woman, who won two Nobel Prizes.
“She was a person of tremendous grit, and she also had a tremendous amount of grief,” said Ms. Sobel of Mme. Curie, who lost her mother to tuberculosis and an older sister to typhus during her childhood in Poland, which was then under the thumb of Russia. It wasn’t until she followed another sister to study in Paris that she was able to pursue her passion for science.
While she would find the mood in France more suited to women’s academic pursuits — she enrolled at the Sorbonne in 1891 — she and Pierre labored in a shed under a glass ceiling that was in many ways a metaphor for the limits to what women could accomplish.
“She was not elected to membership in the French Academy of Science,” said Ms. Sobel. “She couldn’t present the work of her lab, and they, in turn, couldn’t consult her.”
With public interest in radioactivity piquing into the second decade of the 20th Century, Mme. Curie found herself in the public eye more than she cared to be, and many colleagues urged her to not travel to Stockholm to accept her second Nobel due to a scandal in the papers over an affair she was having with physicist Paul Langevin.
Ever the workaholic, Mme. Curie’s lab was filled from the time of Pierre’s death to her own death in 1934 with both male and female researchers doing groundbreaking work in physics and chemistry.
Ms. Sobel’s book includes character sketches of many of the 35 women who worked in the lab during that time, assigning each of them the name of an element, as they were all elements of the success of the lab.
She would also prove a mentor to women working in clinics treating soldiers in World War I, training x-ray technicians and performing x-rays in mobile units near the front lines, where surgeries were vastly improved by the newfound knowledge of the location of projectiles lodged within soldiers’ bodies.
The book is also a tender tale of Mme. Curie’s relationship with her two daughters, Ève, a piano prodigy who would later work as a journalist and author, and Irène, who assisted Mme. Curie in training x-ray technicians during the war at the start of her own decorated career as a chemist and physicist. Irène Joliot-Curie’s discovery, with her husband, Frédéric Joliot-Curie, of how non-radioactive substances could be made radioactive, laid the groundwork for the couple to follow the family legacy in receiving a Nobel Prize the year after Mme. Curie’s death.
The book does not shy away from the price workers in the lab paid for their lifelong exposure to radioactivity, whose long-term side effects were unknown when they began their research, but it does make clear that Mme. Curie’s lab became aware of the safety risks and did what it could at the time to minimize them. Her own cause of death, of “aplastic pernicious anemia” at the age of 66, is believed to have been due to the damage done to her blood by a lifetime of radiation exposure.
“I wanted to tell the story as a mentor for other women who were not as famous, but became scientists because of her,” said Ms. Sobel.
Members of the audience asked the author if she’s found, in her research, a common drive shared by scientists who have changed the world.
“Some people have the idea that scientists are cold and detached, but that’s not true,” says Ms. Sobel. “They are extremely passionate, and what they do is creative.”
More people don’t know about how creative the scientific process is, she said, because “we have more access to the creative process of visual artists, or writers.”
This book is a glimpse into just how lively, collaborative and collegial that world can be.
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