Unit 4 Force of Nature
Barbara Goldsmith
1. While I was a teenager growing up in New Rochelle, New York, I had up on my bulletin board a photo of Marie Curie sitting under an elm tree, her arms wrapped around her daughters, two-year-old Eve and nine-year-old Irene. I didn't know very much about Curie beyond the basics: She and her husband had discovered radioactivity. She was the first person to win two Nobel prizes. She was brilliant, single-minded, a legend. I was just a girl with little direction, more drawn to words and made-up stories than to formulas and lab experiments.
2. Looking back, I think I admired that photo so much, not becau of Marie Curie and what she stood for but becau she emed so exotic — or maybe becau of how her arms encircled her girls. My own mother lay in the hospital, recovering from a grave injury in a car crash. I wanted her to hold me, but she couldn't. So, instead, I idolized Marie, who in my mind became the strongest and most capable woman in the world.
3. Like any girl's fantasy, mine contained at least a shred of truth. Marie Curie's own daughters grew into accomplished women in their own right, though their mother was obssively engaged in her rearch before they were born. Curie was what we might today call a super-competent multi-tasker: Her work revolutionized the study of atomic energy and radioactivity, and she's one of a pitiful few female scientists whom schoolchildren ever study. Also she was a woman driven by passions, fighting battles much of her life with what a doctor now would probably diagno as vere depression. In the end, her most brilliant discovery proved fatal for both her and her husband.
4. When Curie was 10 years old, in 1878, her mother died of tuberculosis. The Polish girl then known as Manya Sklodowska carried on with her schoolwork as if nothing had happened, but for months she'd find places to hide so she could cry her eyes out.
5. At age 18, she landed a job as governess to a wealthy family near Warsaw. She wound up falling in love with Casimir Zorawski, an accomplished student of 19 with whom she shared a love of nature and science. But when Casimir announced that he and Many
a wanted to marry, his father threatened to disinherit him. She was beneath his station, poor, a common nurmaid. Definitely no. Four years dragged by. Finally, Manya told Casimir, "If you cannot decide, I cannot decide for you." In what still ems to me a remarkable act of courage, Manya then gathered her meager savings and took a train to Paris, where she changed her name, enrolled at the Sorbonne — and walked into history.
6. In 1893, she became the first woman to earn a degree in physics at the Sorbonne. If you have ever en the 1943 film Madame Curie, you know the broad brush strokes of her early experiments to find a mysterious, hidden new element. There's a scene in which actress Greer Garson, as Marie, stirs a boiling vat, her face glistening with sweat. Late at night, Marie and her husband, Pierre, enter the lab to e a tiny luminous stain congealed in a dish. "Oh, Pierre! Could it be?" exclaims Marie as tears roll down her cheeks. Yes, this was it — radium!
7. The reality was a lot grittier — and a lot less romantic. Marie and Pierre, whom she married in 1895, did indeed work side by side late into the night. But their lab was so sha
bby and dank that their daughter Irene, at age three, called it "that sad, sad place". And one prominent scientist said that had he not en the worktable, he would have thought he was in a stable.
8. In time, the Curies became world famous, especially after they won a Nobel Prize in physics in 1903 for the discovery of radioactivity. They were the toast of the European scientific community, feted lavishly and visited at home in Paris by acolytes who came from as far away as New Zealand to pay homage.
9. For the Curies, though, their triumph contained the eds of their tragedy. Remember, they worked around radioactivity nearly every day. Even before winning the Nobel, Pierre was verely ill from exposure to this fierce energy. He had open sores on his hands and fingers, and increasing difficulty walking. In 1906, he fell into the path of a wagon drawn by two huge draft hors, and a wheel ran over his head. He died instantly.
10. Years later, Eve Curie, scarcely a year old when her father died, wrote that Pierre's death marked the defining moment in her mother's life: "Marie Curie did not change from
a happy young wife to an inconsolable widow. The metamorphosis was less simple, more rious. A cape of solitude and crecy fell upon her shoulders forever." Marie was just 38. The Sunday after the funeral, instead of staying with family and friends, she retreated to the lab. In her diary she wrote Pierre: "I want to talk to you in the silence of this laboratory, where I didn't think I could live without you."
11. The work that Marie and Pierre had begun went on after his death. A cond Nobel in chemistry went to Marie alone for isolating the elements radium and polonium.
12. With the ont of World War I in 1914, she recognized that mobile X-ray8 units could save lives in battlefield hospitals, so she established a fleet of the vehicles, known as petites Curies, or little Curies. She and Irene drove one themlves.
