December 30, 2024 • 15 mins
90 years ago, the world lost the most famous woman in the history of science: Marie Curie. Shining the spotlight on this remarkable woman is Pulitzer Prize finalist and bestselling author Dava Sobel in her new book, THE ELEMENTS OF MARIE CURIE: How the glow of radium lit a path for women in science. Dava Sobel is the author of the international bestseller Longitude, the bestselling Pulitzer Prize finalist Galileo’s Daughter, The Planets, A More Perfect Heaven, and other books.
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Get Connected with Nina del Rio, a weekly
conversation about fitness, health and happenings in our community on
one oh six point seven Light FM.
Speaker 2 (00:12):
Welcome to Get Connected. Ninety years ago, the world lost
the most famous woman in the history of science, Marie Currie.
Shining the spotlight today on this remarkable woman is Pultzer
Prize finalist and best selling author Davis Soble in her
new book The Elements of Marie Currey, How the Glow
of Radium lit a path for women in science. David Sobel,
(00:32):
thank you for being on the show.
Speaker 3 (00:34):
I'm happy to be with you.
Speaker 2 (00:35):
David Soble is the recipient of the Individual Public Service
Award from the National Science Board, the Bradford Washburn Award,
and a Goggenheim Fellowship, among other honors. A former New
York Times science reporter and currently editor of the Meter
Poetry column in Scientific American. As you begin the book Data,
nearly a century after her death, Marie Curry remains pretty
(00:56):
much the only female scientist people can name. She was
the first women to receive a Nobel Prize and remains
the only Nobel laureate decorated in two separate fields of science, physics,
and chemistry. There are many books about her. What did
you want to explore with yours?
Speaker 3 (01:12):
I wanted to explore the fact that she was never
the only woman scientist, nor did she want to be,
and that she had brought about forty five women into
her laboratory, including her own daughter.
Speaker 2 (01:27):
Including her own daughter, her children went on to become
scientists as well her grandchildren. It wasn't until about twenty
four actually she was really able to begin her scientific
study in earnest in Paris. Can you talk about her
early life and getting to that point.
Speaker 3 (01:43):
Yes, she was born in Warsaw at a time when
the country of Poland really didn't exist. It had been
divided and her section was under Russian authority, and so
early on, even in school, in certain schools, she was
prohibited from speaking Polish, and certainly she could not go
(02:07):
to university. No women were admitted, and her family, although
they were teachers and they were very encouraging, there was
a lot of illness. So they didn't have money to
help her travel out of the country and attend the
University of Paris. So she worked as a governess for
(02:29):
enough years to earn that money, and one of her
older sisters also helped her. The two of them made
this pact, the older one would go first and then
become a doctor and be able to help Marie, and
they actually pulled it off.
Speaker 2 (02:46):
Marie met her future husband and partner, Pierre Curie, when
they began to work on a scientific project together. He
would have been a remarkable man at that time to
see her as a peer.
Speaker 3 (02:55):
Indeed, and he would have been even more remarkable for
him to see her as a life partner because he
was determined to not really get involved with women. But
she impressed him on every level and vice versa, and
they had a truly wonderful marriage. And her research, which
(03:19):
started out as independent research, quickly became so interesting to
him that he dropped what he was doing to join her,
and they made a couple of monumental discoveries together which
enabled them to share the nineteen oh three Nobel Prize
in physics.
Speaker 2 (03:39):
Can you talk a little bit about their primary areas
of work and study and what they were trying to discover.
Speaker 3 (03:44):
They were both physicists, and in the eighteen nineties the
discovery of X rays really turned the whole physics community
upside down. People were fascinated by these invisible rays that
had suddenly come to light, so to speak. And a
(04:05):
year later another kind of ray came to be known
called uranic rays, which were emitted by uranium and any
uranium containing compound. So, with the whole world fixated on
X rays, Marie thought that the uranic rays would make
(04:28):
a good topic for her doctoral dissertation. So she was
ready to proceed to a PhD, which she did, and
she was the first woman to earn a PhD in
physics in France.
Speaker 2 (04:43):
Jumping ahead a little bit anywhere, jumping ahead a little bit.
The practical application of that is, she was, you know,
she had this van eventually with X ray equipment sheet
they used during World War One.
Speaker 3 (04:56):
Right during World War One. She realized immediately that her
knowledge of X rays could be life saving on the battlefront.
So she outfitted a van and took off and convinced
the military authorities and also convinced medical personnel, because although
the physicists had jumped on X rays, it was slow
(05:21):
spreading to the medical community, and a lot of the
doctors ready to operate on these wounded soldiers were not
familiar with X ray technology at all or even aware
of how crucial it would be in those years, so
she was introducing them to this new tool and they
(05:43):
were very quickly convinced, of course, But then they needed
X ray facilities, so she would drive her van on
someplace else and try to arrange for a unit to
be set up at that particular field Hime Hospital, and
then the next field hospital. And she also instituted a
(06:06):
crash course. She offered six week course for French women
who were willing to undertake that kind of dangerous but
vital work. And she taught them X ray theory and
practice and electricity and human anatomy, and off they went,
one hundred and fifty of them.
Speaker 2 (06:27):
Our guest is Davis Soble. Her new book is The
Elements of Marie Curie, How the Glow of Radium lit
a path for women in science. David Sobol is the
author of the international bestseller Longitude, the best selling Pulitzer
Prize finalist Galileo's Daughter, The Planets Are More Perfect Heaven,
and other books. You're listening to get connected on one
six point seven light FM. I'm Inna del Rio. Throughout
(06:50):
her life she was not one to focus on her
own health. Can you talk a little bit about the
ailments she suffered and the impact they had on her health,
her work on her health, and what did they know
about the connection at the time.
Speaker 3 (07:04):
When Marie and Pierre discovered radium. One of the first
things they noticed about this new element was that they
got burns on their hands, and they reported this in
the medical literature, and doctors seized on it, thinking if
it destroys tissue, it could destroy tumors, and sure enough,
(07:29):
for about twenty years, radium was the prevailing cure for cancer.
They worried about their own health. People are incredulous now
looking back, they're working in this shed. They didn't have
ventilation hoods, there was no kind of protection, and when
she was administering X rays at the front, she was
(07:53):
wearing a cotton smock. As you know if you go
to the dentists and get X rays to lead blanket
on you and the dentist leaves the room. So her
exposure was extreme and she started suffering various health effects,
but as a scientist committed fascinated by her work, she
(08:19):
brushed off the signs that the stuff was bad for her.
And I think her first real confrontation with the health
effects came in the nineteen twenties via the Radium girls,
the young women who were painting watch dials and other
(08:43):
dials used in trenches with radium laced paint, which they
were instructed to use by dipping the paint brush in
the paint and then putting the brush in their mouths
to bring the tip to a point. So they're ingesting
radium and it's in their bodies and it stays there forever.
(09:08):
Radium has a half life of sixteen hundred years, so
these women started dying, and it was a cluster phenomenon
in a particular occupation, so clearly there was an occupational
health elements there. Element comes up so often in conversation,
(09:31):
but of course she never advocated using it in paint
or telling people to put paintbrushes in their mouths, so
she was apart from it. Yet she felt terrible about
it and really was on record as saying that she
felt they deserved justice and compensation, but it was really
(09:53):
too late for them.
Speaker 2 (09:55):
What are some of the other ways he renown and
impact influenced female science at the time and some of
the women that she mentored.
Speaker 3 (10:04):
I think it made the pursuit of science real and
realizable for many women, which is what would motivate them
to come to her from so far away. She was
so admired, so exemplary, and because they came from many countries,
(10:26):
they went home to their own countries where they taught
about the new science. And they also established themselves in
several cases as the first female professors in their own countries.
So it had a tremendous rippling effect. And then she
was a teacher, so she was teaching physics, not only
(10:49):
at the university level. Even before that, though, she was
a physics instructor at a girl's academy for future teachers,
and for a while she even created a little school
for her own daughter and the daughter's friends. So imagine
having your school with all of the teachers are university
(11:15):
faculty members, and you're actually going to the university lab
to do experiments and being trusted to do that. Because
she wasn't doing radioactivity experiments with the children, but nevertheless,
they had a real taste and a real sense from
her about you've got to do the math. You've got
(11:36):
to be able to do mental arithmetic perfectly and quickly.
She really beat that into them.
Speaker 2 (11:44):
One of the great things about this book is I
think it addresses something that we see with people of
renown and especially in scientific fields. There's a perspective that
they are these isolated geniuses. Perhaps Marie Curie had a life.
She loved her husband before he was killed. She was
very close to her daughters and shepherded them throughout their lives.
(12:04):
She was also a person who was used by the
press to sell papers. She was seen as a heroine
and a villain. She was the only woman in the
room at scientific gatherings that had to put some pressure.
What do we know about her perspective on how she
was seen at the time.
Speaker 3 (12:21):
I think she usually felt that she didn't understand why
all the fuss was being made, why people needed to
make such a fuss over her. It was very tedious.
She was shy at the beginning. She did not speak
well in public. It caused her a lot of anxiety,
and she was just mystified by it. I think she
(12:44):
realized that most people meant well by it, so she
tried to be polite and gracious, but it was difficult
for her.
Speaker 2 (12:55):
The number of women working in STEM is more than
it's ever been still government census figures, which I looked
up this Morning Show, women just about a quarter of
the STEM workforce. Your thoughts on that, as someone who's
followed science writes about science and why at the very
least is parody important?
Speaker 3 (13:17):
As we know people who have different backgrounds, different mindsets
bring new perspective to anything. It's always valuable and women
have proven that repeatedly, but somehow we have to keep
proving it. So there's that. Then there's the fact that
(13:39):
forty percent of American women scientists leave their fields when
they have a child because we don't provide adequate or
affordable childcare. So one of the great advantages Madame Currey
enjoyed was a father in law who willing to move
(14:01):
in with the young family and take over caring for
the children while the parents were at work. How many
people have that. Even when she could afford professional childcare,
she was still very involved and insisted on closeness with
(14:24):
her children because she valued her family life. She valued
her siblings and stayed in tight relationships with them even
though they were living for apart. Most of her family
stayed in Poland. Even the sister who had preceded her
to Paris went back to Poland to open a sanitarium,
(14:48):
so she managed to keep those ties to nurture them.
Speaker 2 (14:56):
It's interesting how those issues of family and work that
were still trying to work that out today. The book
is The Elements of Marie Curie, How the Glow of
Radium Lit a Path for Women in Science, by David Sobel.
Thank you for being on Get Connected.
Speaker 3 (15:10):
I've enjoyed talking to you so much. Thank you.
Speaker 1 (15:14):
This has been Get Connected with Nina del Rio on
one oh six point seven light Fm. The views and
opinions of our guests do not necessarily reflect the views
of the station. If you missed any part of our
show or want to share it, visit our website for
downloads and podcasts at one oh six to seven lightfm
dot com. Thanks for listening.
Welcome to Get Connected with Nina del Rio, a weekly
conversation about fitness, health and happenings in our community on
one oh six point seven Light FM.
Speaker 2 (00:12):
Welcome to Get Connected. Ninety years ago, the world lost
the most famous woman in the history of science, Marie Currie.
Shining the spotlight today on this remarkable woman is Pultzer
Prize finalist and best selling author Davis Soble in her
new book The Elements of Marie Currey, How the Glow
of Radium lit a path for women in science. David Sobel,
(00:32):
thank you for being on the show.
Speaker 3 (00:34):
I'm happy to be with you.
Speaker 2 (00:35):
David Soble is the recipient of the Individual Public Service
Award from the National Science Board, the Bradford Washburn Award,
and a Goggenheim Fellowship, among other honors. A former New
York Times science reporter and currently editor of the Meter
Poetry column in Scientific American. As you begin the book Data,
nearly a century after her death, Marie Curry remains pretty
(00:56):
much the only female scientist people can name. She was
the first women to receive a Nobel Prize and remains
the only Nobel laureate decorated in two separate fields of science, physics,
and chemistry. There are many books about her. What did
you want to explore with yours?
Speaker 3 (01:12):
I wanted to explore the fact that she was never
the only woman scientist, nor did she want to be,
and that she had brought about forty five women into
her laboratory, including her own daughter.
Speaker 2 (01:27):
Including her own daughter, her children went on to become
scientists as well her grandchildren. It wasn't until about twenty
four actually she was really able to begin her scientific
study in earnest in Paris. Can you talk about her
early life and getting to that point.
Speaker 3 (01:43):
Yes, she was born in Warsaw at a time when
the country of Poland really didn't exist. It had been
divided and her section was under Russian authority, and so
early on, even in school, in certain schools, she was
prohibited from speaking Polish, and certainly she could not go
(02:07):
to university. No women were admitted, and her family, although
they were teachers and they were very encouraging, there was
a lot of illness. So they didn't have money to
help her travel out of the country and attend the
University of Paris. So she worked as a governess for
(02:29):
enough years to earn that money, and one of her
older sisters also helped her. The two of them made
this pact, the older one would go first and then
become a doctor and be able to help Marie, and
they actually pulled it off.
Speaker 2 (02:46):
Marie met her future husband and partner, Pierre Curie, when
they began to work on a scientific project together. He
would have been a remarkable man at that time to
see her as a peer.
Speaker 3 (02:55):
Indeed, and he would have been even more remarkable for
him to see her as a life partner because he
was determined to not really get involved with women. But
she impressed him on every level and vice versa, and
they had a truly wonderful marriage. And her research, which
(03:19):
started out as independent research, quickly became so interesting to
him that he dropped what he was doing to join her,
and they made a couple of monumental discoveries together which
enabled them to share the nineteen oh three Nobel Prize
in physics.
Speaker 2 (03:39):
Can you talk a little bit about their primary areas
of work and study and what they were trying to discover.
Speaker 3 (03:44):
They were both physicists, and in the eighteen nineties the
discovery of X rays really turned the whole physics community
upside down. People were fascinated by these invisible rays that
had suddenly come to light, so to speak. And a
(04:05):
year later another kind of ray came to be known
called uranic rays, which were emitted by uranium and any
uranium containing compound. So, with the whole world fixated on
X rays, Marie thought that the uranic rays would make
(04:28):
a good topic for her doctoral dissertation. So she was
ready to proceed to a PhD, which she did, and
she was the first woman to earn a PhD in
physics in France.
Speaker 2 (04:43):
Jumping ahead a little bit anywhere, jumping ahead a little bit.
The practical application of that is, she was, you know,
she had this van eventually with X ray equipment sheet
they used during World War One.
Speaker 3 (04:56):
Right during World War One. She realized immediately that her
knowledge of X rays could be life saving on the battlefront.
So she outfitted a van and took off and convinced
the military authorities and also convinced medical personnel, because although
the physicists had jumped on X rays, it was slow
(05:21):
spreading to the medical community, and a lot of the
doctors ready to operate on these wounded soldiers were not
familiar with X ray technology at all or even aware
of how crucial it would be in those years, so
she was introducing them to this new tool and they
(05:43):
were very quickly convinced, of course, But then they needed
X ray facilities, so she would drive her van on
someplace else and try to arrange for a unit to
be set up at that particular field Hime Hospital, and
then the next field hospital. And she also instituted a
(06:06):
crash course. She offered six week course for French women
who were willing to undertake that kind of dangerous but
vital work. And she taught them X ray theory and
practice and electricity and human anatomy, and off they went,
one hundred and fifty of them.
Speaker 2 (06:27):
Our guest is Davis Soble. Her new book is The
Elements of Marie Curie, How the Glow of Radium lit
a path for women in science. David Sobol is the
author of the international bestseller Longitude, the best selling Pulitzer
Prize finalist Galileo's Daughter, The Planets Are More Perfect Heaven,
and other books. You're listening to get connected on one
six point seven light FM. I'm Inna del Rio. Throughout
(06:50):
her life she was not one to focus on her
own health. Can you talk a little bit about the
ailments she suffered and the impact they had on her health,
her work on her health, and what did they know
about the connection at the time.
Speaker 3 (07:04):
When Marie and Pierre discovered radium. One of the first
things they noticed about this new element was that they
got burns on their hands, and they reported this in
the medical literature, and doctors seized on it, thinking if
it destroys tissue, it could destroy tumors, and sure enough,
(07:29):
for about twenty years, radium was the prevailing cure for cancer.
They worried about their own health. People are incredulous now
looking back, they're working in this shed. They didn't have
ventilation hoods, there was no kind of protection, and when
she was administering X rays at the front, she was
(07:53):
wearing a cotton smock. As you know if you go
to the dentists and get X rays to lead blanket
on you and the dentist leaves the room. So her
exposure was extreme and she started suffering various health effects,
but as a scientist committed fascinated by her work, she
(08:19):
brushed off the signs that the stuff was bad for her.
And I think her first real confrontation with the health
effects came in the nineteen twenties via the Radium girls,
the young women who were painting watch dials and other
(08:43):
dials used in trenches with radium laced paint, which they
were instructed to use by dipping the paint brush in
the paint and then putting the brush in their mouths
to bring the tip to a point. So they're ingesting
radium and it's in their bodies and it stays there forever.
(09:08):
Radium has a half life of sixteen hundred years, so
these women started dying, and it was a cluster phenomenon
in a particular occupation, so clearly there was an occupational
health elements there. Element comes up so often in conversation,
(09:31):
but of course she never advocated using it in paint
or telling people to put paintbrushes in their mouths, so
she was apart from it. Yet she felt terrible about
it and really was on record as saying that she
felt they deserved justice and compensation, but it was really
(09:53):
too late for them.
Speaker 2 (09:55):
What are some of the other ways he renown and
impact influenced female science at the time and some of
the women that she mentored.
Speaker 3 (10:04):
I think it made the pursuit of science real and
realizable for many women, which is what would motivate them
to come to her from so far away. She was
so admired, so exemplary, and because they came from many countries,
(10:26):
they went home to their own countries where they taught
about the new science. And they also established themselves in
several cases as the first female professors in their own countries.
So it had a tremendous rippling effect. And then she
was a teacher, so she was teaching physics, not only
(10:49):
at the university level. Even before that, though, she was
a physics instructor at a girl's academy for future teachers,
and for a while she even created a little school
for her own daughter and the daughter's friends. So imagine
having your school with all of the teachers are university
(11:15):
faculty members, and you're actually going to the university lab
to do experiments and being trusted to do that. Because
she wasn't doing radioactivity experiments with the children, but nevertheless,
they had a real taste and a real sense from
her about you've got to do the math. You've got
(11:36):
to be able to do mental arithmetic perfectly and quickly.
She really beat that into them.
Speaker 2 (11:44):
One of the great things about this book is I
think it addresses something that we see with people of
renown and especially in scientific fields. There's a perspective that
they are these isolated geniuses. Perhaps Marie Curie had a life.
She loved her husband before he was killed. She was
very close to her daughters and shepherded them throughout their lives.
(12:04):
She was also a person who was used by the
press to sell papers. She was seen as a heroine
and a villain. She was the only woman in the
room at scientific gatherings that had to put some pressure.
What do we know about her perspective on how she
was seen at the time.
Speaker 3 (12:21):
I think she usually felt that she didn't understand why
all the fuss was being made, why people needed to
make such a fuss over her. It was very tedious.
She was shy at the beginning. She did not speak
well in public. It caused her a lot of anxiety,
and she was just mystified by it. I think she
(12:44):
realized that most people meant well by it, so she
tried to be polite and gracious, but it was difficult
for her.
Speaker 2 (12:55):
The number of women working in STEM is more than
it's ever been still government census figures, which I looked
up this Morning Show, women just about a quarter of
the STEM workforce. Your thoughts on that, as someone who's
followed science writes about science and why at the very
least is parody important?
Speaker 3 (13:17):
As we know people who have different backgrounds, different mindsets
bring new perspective to anything. It's always valuable and women
have proven that repeatedly, but somehow we have to keep
proving it. So there's that. Then there's the fact that
(13:39):
forty percent of American women scientists leave their fields when
they have a child because we don't provide adequate or
affordable childcare. So one of the great advantages Madame Currey
enjoyed was a father in law who willing to move
(14:01):
in with the young family and take over caring for
the children while the parents were at work. How many
people have that. Even when she could afford professional childcare,
she was still very involved and insisted on closeness with
(14:24):
her children because she valued her family life. She valued
her siblings and stayed in tight relationships with them even
though they were living for apart. Most of her family
stayed in Poland. Even the sister who had preceded her
to Paris went back to Poland to open a sanitarium,
(14:48):
so she managed to keep those ties to nurture them.
Speaker 2 (14:56):
It's interesting how those issues of family and work that
were still trying to work that out today. The book
is The Elements of Marie Curie, How the Glow of
Radium Lit a Path for Women in Science, by David Sobel.
Thank you for being on Get Connected.
Speaker 3 (15:10):
I've enjoyed talking to you so much. Thank you.
Speaker 1 (15:14):
This has been Get Connected with Nina del Rio on
one oh six point seven light Fm. The views and
opinions of our guests do not necessarily reflect the views
of the station. If you missed any part of our
show or want to share it, visit our website for
downloads and podcasts at one oh six to seven lightfm
dot com. Thanks for listening.
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