The Elements of Marie Curie, by Dava Sobel • Book Reviews

Nonfiction by Dava Sobel, reviewed by Beth Johnston
The Elements of Marie Curie: How the Glow of Radium Lit a Path for Women in Science (Atlantic Monthly Press)

In The Elements of Marie Curie, Pulitzer-prize winner Dava Sobel promises not only to bring her popular storytelling to one of the world’s most famous scientific subjects, but also to explain, as her subtitle puts it, “How the Glow of Radium Lit a Path for Women in Science.” While Sobel succeeds in telling an amazing story, it’s not the one she advertises. Her dutiful account of the women scientists that Marie Curie mentored pales in comparison to the far more fascinating tale of the Curie family and their scientific achievements.

The first third of the book sketches Marie Curie’s life through 1911, when she won her first Nobel Prize. Maria Skłodowska, as she was first known, was born in Warsaw in 1867 to a family that valued education. Marie’s brother attended university in Poland, but his alma mater did not admit women. So Marie and her older sister enrolled at the Sorbonne, which did allow women. Marie arrived in Paris in 1891 as a 24-year-old of astonishing determination. She came first in her class pursuing a degree in the physical sciences, then immediately turned around to earn another degree in mathematics, coming second in her class.

While at the Sorbonne, Marie experimented on magnets for use in industry—a research project that not only helped fund her education but introduced her to her future husband. Pierre Curie was a science teacher at a local industrial school. Within three years, the two had married and had a child, Pierre finished his PhD, and Marie Curie had decided on the topic for her doctoral dissertation, an endeavor that would change the course of history.

Marie decided to focus on the newly-named “uranic rays”—what we know as radioactivity—that emanated from compounds of uranium. She not only identified uranium as the source of the rays, but with Pierre discovered two other elements far more radioactive than uranium: polonium, named after Marie’s home country, and radium.

The story of the Curies’ research has been told many times, but it remains compelling, especially in Sobel’s hands. Her version is fast-paced and logical, with each step in the Curies’ thinking clearly leading to the next set of experiments, the next conclusion. It’s romantic—a young couple celebrating the end of their workday by admiring the soft glow of radium solutions and compounds. It’s also tragic because the Curies didn’t fully know radium’s dangers. (They had some idea of the risks. Pierre deliberately burned himself with radium at one point and carefully recorded his healing process.)

The romance and excitement of the Curies’ discovery was also clear to everyone at the time. In the wake of their Nobel win, Marie told her brother in a letter, “We are inundated with letters and with visits from photographers and journalists.” The publicity had benefits: Pierre, who was teaching a course at the Sorbonne, was now offered a full professorship there, along with a laboratory and staff that Marie would supervise. The Curies’ family was expanding; they had a second daughter, Eve, in 1904. And then, disaster: in the spring of 1906, Pierre was killed instantly in a traffic accident in Paris. Marie, heartbroken, nevertheless took over his chair at the Sorbonne, becoming the University’s first female professor as well as the head of the Curie laboratory.

For the remainder of the book, Marie’s role managing and directing the laboratory and its projects is front and center. Hearing that a radium institute was being built in Vienna, Curie planned and helped design a comparable institute at the Sorbonne to coordinate study of both the physics and chemistry of radioactivity and of its medical applications. She isolated a sample of pure radium, an incredibly difficult task with an unstable element. She oversaw the creation of an international radium standard, so that other radium institutes (including one she helped establish in Warsaw) could confirm the quality of their own standards against hers. She regularly attended gatherings of prominent physicists, including Planck, Rutherford, Heisenberg, Fermi, Bohr, and Einstein. (As an adult, Eve Curie would later remember how on a family hiking trip with the Einsteins, she overheard Albert say to her mother, “You understand, what I need to know is exactly what happens to the passengers in an elevator when it falls into emptiness.”) In 1911, Marie won a second Nobel, this time in chemistry. And during World War I, she pioneered the application of x-ray technology to allow surgeons to better understand soldiers’ injuries. She outfitted privately funded mobile x-ray units that could go to hospitals in need of the equipment, and she started a program to train women as x-ray technicians. During the course of the war, whether in Curie’s cars or an army hospital, nearly a million French soldiers were examined by x-ray to diagnose or treat their injuries.

As Sobel notes, part of Marie’s work in the lab entailed supervising “the forty-five aspiring female scientists” who worked or had fellowships there. In what often feels like a forced march, Sobel dutifully introduces each woman as she secures a place working in the lab. Without a doubt, much of the allure of a job in Curie’s lab was the opportunity to learn from the world’s most prominent woman scientist. It also seems likely, though Sobel never says so outright, that Marie was more open to hosting women researchers than were her male peers. Aside from this, however, there’s no sense that gender mattered in Curie’s lab, her research, or her mentorship. And there’s no claim that Curie’s lab produced a cadre of women doing pioneering research in physics. With the exception of Ellen Gleditsch, who became the second Norwegian woman to earn a full professorship, most of the women who worked in the Curie lab did not go on to conduct significant research on radioactivity. Given this, Sobel doesn’t manage to convince the reader that radium “lit a path for women in science.”

But it did light a path for one woman very important to Marie Curie: her daughter, Irène. Irène shared her parents’ intellectual interests, and during World War I, as a young nursing student, Irène helped her mother with much of the work of implementing the mobile x-ray vehicles and training x-ray technicians. In 1925, Irène earned her PhD, and in 1929, she married Frédéric Joliot, a fellow researcher at the Curie Institute.

Like Marie and Peirre before them, Irène and Frédéric worked together on cutting-edge experiments trying to solve one of the most fundamental questions of chemistry and physics at the time: how the many products of radioactive decay related to one another, and what process generated them. They began bombarding the nuclei of atoms with alpha particles, ultimately creating radioactive isotopes of a whole range of elements. As Sobel explains, their work had “crucial practical applications”; now scientists could create radioactive isotopes at will rather than by processing large quantities of dangerous ore.

The Curie-Joliots presented Marie Curie with a sample of their radioactive research in January, 1934, and Marie delighted in their success. It was, Frédéric wrote later, “the last great satisfaction of her life”; in July of 1934, Marie Curie died of anemia. The following year, the Curie-Joliots jointly won the Nobel prize in chemistry for their discovery, making Irène Curie-Joliot just the second woman, after her mother, to win a Nobel in chemistry. (Even today, there are only eight women Nobel laureates in chemistry.)

Irène’s career wouldn’t have been possible without her parents’ success. Today, we might dismiss her as a mere “nepo baby,” but Sobel makes a much more convincing case that Irène was part of a scientific project that was multifaceted and multigenerational. Obviously, all science builds on itself, but Sobel demonstrates how it is also embedded in relationships—and in institutions, from the Sorbonne to the French Academie system to the international scientific groups. In this sense, Marie Curie’s most notable achievement was not really serving as a mentor for women; it was building and fostering a scientific community supported by a solid institutional foundation, bringing together scientists—women and men—and making room for their achievements. In this sense, Sobel’s book shows us the inverse of a lone (male) genius. Instead, she has written a work about science in community. Right now, when scientific communities and institutions are under attack, Sobel’s book provides a vital reminder of how much they can achieve when nurtured.

Beth Johnston trained as a lawyer before earning an MFA from Bennington College. She has written essays and reviews for The Washington Post, The New Republic, Paste, and other publications. She lives in Washington, DC, where she works as a writer and editor.