To write a biography of a figure as well known as Marie Curie and still offer something fresh or surprising is no easy undertaking. The double Nobel laureate is, as author Dava Sobel admits, the only female scientist most people can name. She has inspired more biographies and biographies than I can count, including those written by her two daughters. Parents of young children will have come across her story in almost every worthy children’s anthology that graces school bookshelves: she appears in Good night stories for Rebel girls, She persisted around the world and small people, big dreams.
To help shed new light on such an iconic figure, Sobel, a best-selling author of the history of science, interweaves her account of Curie’s life and scientific discoveries with those of dozens of female scientists who passed through her laboratory in Paris.
In doing so, she sets herself a monumental task. Curie’s scientific output was prodigious, her personal life turbulent and often difficult. She was born Maria Salomea Skłodowska in Poland in 1867, the fifth child of two school teachers. By the age of 10, she had lost her mother and one sister to tuberculosis and typhus. She worked as a governess until the family could raise enough money for her to enroll at the Sorbonne in Paris, where she was one of 23 women and about 2,000 men to join the science faculty. After graduating top of her class, she won a scholarship to continue her studies.
She met her husband, the physicist Pierre Curie, in 1894 while doing research on the magnetic properties of steel. As newlyweds, they collaborated on Marie’s doctoral dissertation studying the unusual energy emitted by uranium. During their investigation of what they would later call radioactivity, they discovered two new elements – polonium and radium – and helped improve everything scientists understood about the material world. Curie’s work would show that atoms were not, as believed, indivisible, the fundamental building blocks of our universe. But although the radium she learned to extract from uranium ore could be used as a cancer treatment, it also caused cancer: many who worked in her laboratory, including most likely Curie herself, died as a result of their exposure.
In addition to all the firsts – Curie was the first woman to win a Nobel Prize and remains the only person to win Nobel Prizes in two different fields – she was also a devoted mother and caregiver to elderly family members. She experienced the grief of a miscarriage, and then in 1906 the earth-shattering loss of her beloved husband, Pierre, in a carriage accident. A few years later, she had an affair with the married physicist Paul Langevin that became a public scandal and practically forced her into hiding. She lived through World War I, when she led efforts to bring X-ray units closer to the battlefield to treat wounded soldiers, and rode one that way. car radiology herself. She lectured widely and befriended many great scientists of her time, including Albert Einstein. There is, in other words, a lot to cover before you even consider the women whose paths briefly crossed with the Curies until their work or life took them in other directions.
Dava Sobel is a former New York Times science reporter and the author of bestsellers such as Galileo’s daughter and longitude, which tells the extraordinary story of how an 18th-century clockmaker solved the greatest scientific problem of his time. Skilled at explaining complex science clearly, she has chosen an artful way to structure her material, emphasizing the collision of science and biography by naming each chapter after a scientist and an element. But with so much ground to cover, the emotional heart of many stories is lost in a sea of new names, or detailed accounts of important but esoteric work to settle, say, a dispute over the half-life of an element.
One particularly intriguing figure is Harriet Brooks, a prominent Canadian physicist who worked briefly in Curie’s laboratory before giving up her research to marry. Three years later, and despite her own impressive career, she publicly blamed the lack of female scientists on women’s intellectual and physical shortcomings and suggested that, although Curie was exceptional, her output had declined after Pierre’s death.
What was behind this, I wondered? What did Curie make of it? We don’t find out. Sobel cannot tell us much about Curie’s relationships with others in her laboratory. Many seem to have worked more closely with her colleague, André-Louis Debierne, than with Curie, who was often sad or unwell or busy with her own work. The scientists’ recorded observations about their boss often do little more than confirm the rather superficial public image we have of her as a sad, reticent woman in a dark formal dress, whose rare smiles are reserved for scientific breakthroughs.
One of the researchers with whom Curie did collaborate very closely was her eldest daughter, Irène, who would later also win a Nobel Prize. Marie and Irène’s relationship was adorable and apparently – even if it’s hard to believe that’s the whole story – uncomplicated. Sobel does an excellent job of helping the reader understand the historical importance and context of Curie’s work, but her inner life remains largely mysterious. I found myself itching to consult other sources – her collected letters to her daughters, her bereavement journal, the biography written by her other daughter, Ève – to fill in the blanks.
to newsletter promotion
I suspect this partly reflects the difficulty of writing about someone so emotionally reserved. For example, when Curie was passed over for admission to the prestigious Académie de Sciences in favor of a less qualified man, she made no public comment, and at other points of high drama in her personal life she simply threw herself into the work. And yet work was never her whole world – her romantic entanglements and principled political views suggest she was a woman of many passions, and I wanted to understand that better. At one point, Curie compares herself to a silkworm, writing to her cousin of her career that: “I did those things because something compelled me to, just as the silkworm is compelled to spin its cocoon.” But even if Curie lacks insight into her own motivations, you want a biographer to advance some well-supported theories.
Curie once wrote of Pierre that “he lived on a plane so rare and so elevated that he sometimes seemed to me a unique being in his freedom from all vanity and from the smallness that one finds in oneself and discovered in others”. In Sobel’s narrative, Curie strikes the reader as a similarly noble, almost holy figure – but don’t we all have weaknesses and flaws? As for the other women Sobel writes about, they are admirable and inspiring, but given such rushed, breathless treatment that they feel as one-dimensional and lifeless as the characters who populate Goodnight Stories for Rebel Girls.
