In the history of science, the first half of the twentieth century belongs, more to physics than to any other branch of science. With the development of the theory of relativity and the discovery of quantum mechanics, there began a period of transformation of our understanding of the laws of nature, whose effects have been profound. This revolution began in a modest way in the last years of the nineteenth century and the early part of the twentieth, with a series of experimental discoveries and the attempt to solve the nagging theoretical problems that they created. It is difficult to overemphasise the decisive role of these experiments, of which the discovery and study of the characteristics of radioactivity formed a fundamental part. Physics and chemistry at the turn of the last century were burdened by an overdose of philosophical speculation and prejudice. On the question of atomic structure there was intense debate, with one school denying the very fact that atoms existed. Much patient work was involved before it became clear that the new experimental discoveries pointed to the existence of atoms and the laws of nature at the atomic level. Marie and Pierre Curie were, together with Ernest Rutherford, J. J. Thompson and other English physicists, among the fundamental contributors of this period. Their work was the foundation on which the subsequent theoretical work was built.
Marie Curie is arguably the best known woman scientist in the history of science. Asked to name a great woman scientist, most laypersons and scientists would probably name her first. Winner of two Nobel prizes, a distinction that is shared by few scientists, she was associated with one of the great scientific discoveries of the physics of the twentieth century. The immediate use of her discovery of the radioactive element radium for medical purposes, especially as a cure for cancer, made her a figure of great public acclaim in her own lifetime. While her scientific achievements alone would have guaranteed her fame, the fact that she was one of the first women to scale the heights she did, has added considerably to the aura that surrounds her name.
There have been other women after her who have won Nobel Prizes in physics or chemistry or have made significant contributions to these subjects. Marie's daughter Irene Joliot-Curie, Lisa Meitner and Maria Goeppert-Mayer are among the names that come immediately to one's mind. And in more recent times there have been a number of women scientists of reknown in biology, medicine and mathematics. But none of their names is accorded the kind of universal recognition that is given to the name of Marie Curie.
One of the main sources for the popular image of Marie Curie has been the biography by her daughter Eve. The dominant image from that work has been one of selfless toil, of great dedication and achievement that was often unrecognised and of a stoic carrying on impervious to personal and professional difficulties. Marie Curie herself, spoke of her life in science in terms of `disinterested dedication', and took the high moral ground. However these earlier accounts, provide little evidence and detail of the price, in both professional and personal terms, that a woman of her era must have had to pay for her role as a pioneer. The difficulties that a woman like Marie must have faced are glossed over. We learn little of how these originated from the society and times in which she lived in or how she coped with them. The de-emphasis of the personal and emotional aspects in these descriptions, creates a superhuman image that a more modern standpoint that is sensitive to gender issues is at odds with.
More than sixty years after Marie Curie's death, gender discrimination continues to be a significant issue in the organisation of science. That there are a number of barriers to the entry of women into the scientific profession is clear from the under-representation of women in several scientific disciplines, especially in the physical sciences. Apart from this, there is another set of issues that affects women who actually work in science. The first issue is overt discrimination; women's achievements tend to be downplayed and their results attributed to male collaborators. Else they are characterised as capable of systematic hard work but denied the ability to make conceptual leaps or initiate conceptual breakthroughs in their work. The second issue is an attitude that operates at a more personal level. There is a popular perception that even if a woman is successful in science, it is at the price of underplaying her feminity in an essentially male world. That a woman cannot be `fully' a woman and yet be successful in science, is a perception that is shared by many women as well as men, and perversely enough this view is shared even by some sections of feminists.
So when Susan Quinn, Marie's latest biographer, refers to penetrating the myth and the `triumphal' image that is part of the popular perception of the great scientist, the task that she seems to set herself is to understand Marie's life and work in relation to these issues from a contemporary woman's point of view. The result is a sensitive biography that explores in detail the difficulties that Marie faced in her scientific career as well as her personal life and her reactions to them. Using new documentary sources, Quinn probes beyond the steely exterior that Marie presented to her scientific colleagues and to the world, to uncover an intensely emotional and passionate individual. And in her detailed account of the attacks that Marie faced from the chauvinist and reactionary elements in politics and the press, and the effort that it took on her part to deal with them, Quinn sharply underlines the pioneering role that Marie played. In this work, that covers substantial new ground, we have perhaps the first complete portrait of Marie Curie as scientist and woman.
Maria Sklodowska was born into a school teacher's family in Poland in 1867, the last of five children. Life was not easy for the close-knit family that faced considerable financial hardship. Death visited the family twice; Maria's eldest sister died of typhus and soon after, when Maria was ten, her mother died of tuberculosis after a prolonged illness. Despite the hardship though, life in this family had its strengths. Marie's family valued education and culture. Marie's father was intensely interested in science and it is clear that the first impulses that pushed her in that direction came from the readiness with which he used every opportunity to teach it to his children. Maria was a brilliant student in school and finished at the age of fifteen, standing first in her class.
Poland at that time was ruled by Tsarist Russia, and the nationalist struggle provided opportunities to women for self-expression that were denied them elewhere in that era. Polish women were free to, and often did, express themselves forcefully on political issues. The young Maria, for instance,was caught dancing in an empty school room celebrating the assassination of Tsar Alexander II. An important influence on Maria was the intellectual trend in Polish nationalism referred to as Polish positivism. This trend emphasised not radical political struggle but study, enlightenment and the importance of science, industry and commerce. This intellectual trend was also an enthusiastic supporter of women's rights and education. A clandestine university for women was organised, since under the Tsarist regime, university education was forbidden to them. Maria was involved in this venture from its inception and had an opportunity to listen to lectures from some of the best minds in Warsaw. This remarkable effort expanded later to include laboratory work and Maria seems to have utilised this opportunity too.
But some years intervened before Maria could resume formal education. She and her sister Bronia worked out a plan to study in Paris. Bronia would go first while Maria worked as a governess and would follow when Bronia was settled in a profession. Maria set to work and continued in the meantime to study on her own. And sometime during these years she resolved to pursue science, especially physics and mathematics, as her chosen field of study. Maria emerged from these years, a determined and independent woman with a keen sense of mission, a sense of a `larger life-purpose beyond the personal.' In contrast to her demeanour later in life, Quinn points out, Maria in these years was a much more open person and poured out her emotions in her interactions with friends and family.
Maria left for Paris in 1891, to study at the Sorbonne. In the years that followed she single-mindedly pursued her studies, moving into independent lodgings when staying with her sister and brother-in-law proved too distracting. Marie, she changed her name soon after arriving in France, seemed to be have been almost unconscious of the fact that she was doing something entirely unusual for the women of her day, especially in France, where women of well-to-do families did not even go out unchaperoned. But these attitudes in society at large did not affect her at the Sorbonne, where she was taught by an eminent faculty, chief amongst whom was the great mathematician and physicist, Henri Poincare. In 1894, Marie graduated, standing first in her examinations for the degree in sciences and second in the examinations for the degree in mathematics.
Marie met Pierre Curie in the spring of 1894 and they were immediately attracted to each other. Pierre Curie, a brilliant and established scientist by then, had all the qualities that would attract a person like Marie. He came from a progressive family, his father had assisted the fighters of the Paris Commune and was a socialist, and had none of the bourgeois prejudices of the times. Like Marie he was deeply attached to his work and took delight from the beginning in Marie's desire to excel at the Sorbonne. By the time he met Marie, Pierre had already done important work on the magnetic properties of materials at different temperatures, some of which is text-book material to this day and forms part of the basics of the modern understanding of magnetism. Pierre's presence in her life, kept Marie in France, where she was to work for the rest of her life. They were married in July 1895. Even before their marriage, their scientific partnership, which was to become one of the most productive husband-wife partnerships in the history of science, had begun. Poincare described it as not just a exchange of ideas but `an exchange of energy'.
The idea of working on radioactivity seems to have been Marie's. She chose it as the subject of her doctoral dissertation. Henri Becquerel had found, a few years earlier, that salts of uranium gave off a radiation that ionized the air around it, a fact that Lord Kelvin had verified. But at the time when Marie chose to pick up the threads of the subject, interest in the phenomenon had died down. This was among the reasons why she chose the subject; it was an opportunity to go down an interesting path that was not too crowded. It was an inspired choice that was to open the way to the physics of the twentieth century. Pierre soon joined her leaving aside his work on magnetism to which he was not to return. Their work together made rapid progress.
In the first report, written by Marie alone, and presented to the Academy of Sciences in April 1898, she conjectures that there is a new element present other than uranium that accounts for the greater activity. This paper, as Abraham Pais has noted in his book `Inward Bound,' had three major results. First, she had found a new radioactive substance. Second, the paper established that the activity of uranium compounds increased with the amount of uranium in it. Third was the conclusion that there were new elements more radioactive than uranium. This was the first major step in the study of radioactivity - radioactivity is a means of discovering new elements.
In the second stage of their work, the Curies tried hard to isolate the new element. In the chemical processing of the ore pitchblende, they came up with two distillates with different levels of activity. One of them, with its activity much higher than uranium, they concluded must have a new element; they named the new element polonium, after Poland. But they could not pin down its presence. And it was not isolated till many year later. They had better luck with the second distillate a few months later. The new element there showed up in spectroscopic analysis and they named it radium. The year 1898, when the Curies discovered polonium and radium, was, as Abraham Pais remarks, the heroic year in the Curies' careers. More work was to follow, but it was to a great extent an elaboration of these discoveries.
Their paths diverged somewhat at this point. Marie took on the task of isolating radium while Pierre turned to examining the meaning of the phenomenon of radioactivity. Marie's task would take a long three years to complete. It was hard work, but when accomplished it provided the ultimate test for the discovery of a new element, its actual isolation. And among the most striking of Pierre's results was his experiment with Albert Laborde in 1903, on the energy given off by radium. The discovery that radium gave off a great deal of energy, more than what was associated with chemical reactions, was a central result in the pursuit of an understanding of the origins of radioactivity. But already by 1900, the crucial importance of the Curies' work was becoming clear.
The story of the work of the Curies, in these years from 1897 to 1903 is among the more remarkable ones in the history of science. As many accounts before Quinn's have also noted, Irene, the first child of the Curies, was born two months before Marie began her work. There are two notebooks of Marie's that run in parallel; one records the events in the laboratory and the other the development of her first child.
The next major leap forward in the study of radioactivity would however come not from the Curies but from Rutherford and Soddy. That was the idea of the transmutation of elements due to radioactivity. As Quinn accurately records, the Curies hesitated over taking this step, narrowly missing the experimental results that would point in this direction. More importantly, they were unwilling, for some years, to accept the radical conclusion that Rutherford and Soddy drew from theirs. This was all the more unfortunate as the Curies and Becquerel had followed up on Rutherford's original work where he had shown that radioactivity had two components, alpha and beta rays. The Curies, among others, showed that these beta rays were really the electrons that Thompson proposed in 1897.
It is worth noting here that Marie did not however hesitate to make a different conceptual leap a few years later. In a prescient remark made at the Solvay conference of 1911, Marie noted that radioactivity probably resulted from transformations from a `deeper region of the atom'( as she termed it) and not, like chemical reactions, from the periphery of the atom. It was a remark that she was not to be able to follow up; though, as is clear from Quinn's account, she was aware of Rutherford's discovery of the nucleus of the atom made a few months ago. It was Bohr who finally showed that both alpha and beta rays have their origin in the nucleus. This was the third major step in understanding the `enigma' of radioactivity. From the original observation of Becquerel, radioactivity had led to nuclear forces, that were very different from the gravitational and electromagnetic forces known until then to physicists.
The account of Marie and Pierre's nominations for the Nobel Prize in physics and its subsequent award in 1903, is a brief but fascinating part of this biography. Clearly there was a strong prejudice against nominating Marie among the French scientific establishment. Her teachers and peers in physics, Gabriel Lippmann and Henri Poincare among them, deliberately kept her out of their nomination, naming only Pierre and Becquerel for their work on radioactivity. It was the intervention of the Swedish mathematician Mittag-Leffler that ensured her inclusion in the nomination for the Prize. The subtlety of the discrimination that Marie often faced from her peers is a point not to be missed in Quinn's account. Early on, the Academy awarded her a prize but informed her of it, not directly, but through Pierre. After Pierre's death they appointed her to his place in the Sorbonne to teach his courses, but not to his chair. They deliberately kept her out of the Nobel nomination, but strongly supported her in her election to the Academy of Sciences. They seem to have always acknowledged her greatness in science but held back from those last steps towards a complete equality.
With the tragic death of Pierre in 1906, in an accident, began a period of intense personal difficulties for Marie. Pierre's death was a great trauma which she would never quite overcome. She presented a firm and stoic face to the world, but inside her was a tremendous anguish that this book is perhaps the first to fathom fully. She was appointed to the faculty of the Sorbonne to take over Pierre's teaching and research duties. But despite this, and the fact that she had become the recognised international authority on radioactivity, the Academy of Sciences denied her membership. In an election that became the focus of the attention of the public and the press, they voted to elect a man of much lesser achievement who stood against her. The right-wing press attacked her nomination bitterly, in a manner that presaged what was to follow during the Langevin affair. Despite the support given to Marie's nomination by some of the most eminent scientific personalities of the Academy, it was the conservative elements who carried the day.
The public revelation, in 1911, of her relationship with Paul Langevin, a French physicist, was disastrous for Marie, who had already become a target of reactionary and chauvinist elements in politics and their mouthpieces in the press. Paul Langevin was himself a brilliant physicist, with important contributions in magnetism to his credit by then, and a progressive man in his political convictions. But he was trapped in a difficult marriage and it was his wife and her lawyers who obtained the Curie-Langevin letters and released them to the press.
Marie was attacked and slandered in print in a manner that has few parallels in the lives of other scientists. The attack had clear political overtones; the xenophobia of the extreme right was evident in the writings. But importantly, as Quinn establishes, it was also directed at the image of the emancipated woman that showed in letters that were published. Marie was not overtly a feminist, but her letters displayed a modern attitude to love, marriage and family. This attitude, in the background of the rising conservative concern over the increasing assertiveness of women in public life, drew the wrath of the right-wing press. While the French scientific establishment dithered over whether to support her, many of Marie's women friends rallied to her side both in private and in public. Eventually the clamour died down when Langevin arrived at a settlement with his wife, but the entire episode resulted in serious setbacks to Marie's health and work.
Today it would appear that the whole business had little to do with Marie Curie's position in the world of science. But this was not an obvious matter in the early years of this century. Awarded the Nobel Prize for chemistry in 1911, at the time the `scandal' broke out, Marie had to firmly reject suggestions that she should not appear in person to accept the award. In a sharp reply, to the Swedish chemist Svante Arrhenius, she stated emphatically that her scientific work had nothing to do with her private life.
Susan Quinn's account of these years after the death of Pierre is probably the most definitive account of this period in Marie Curie's life. Drawing on old sources, as well as new unpublished material, she relates the story at length, with sensitivity and perception. And in the detailed examination of the political and social overtones of the Langevin affair she underlines the importance that Marie had as a pioneering woman of achievement.
The effects of the Langevin affair were not to be erased till the beginning of the First World War. Marie's work in organising and directing the effort to provide X-ray services to the military hospitals during the war, made her a popular figure. In the post-War period, Marie fully came into her own as a scientific leader and administrator. Marie headed the Commission on Intellectual Co-operation of the League of Nations for twelve years. Her institute became one of the leading centres of research in the emerging discipline of nuclear physics. In particular it attracted a significant number of young women to research in physics and chemistry. Among its accomplishments was the discovery of artificial radioactivity by her daughter Irene and son-in-law Frederic Joliot-Curie, a success that Marie lived to see. They were awarded the Nobel Prize for this work in 1935.
Marie died in 1934, of an aplastic, pernicious anaemia. Her body injured by long exposure to radiation could not fight back.
The life of Marie Curie is a moving story. And in this biography by Susan Quinn emerges a figure, whose pioneering role and great achievements are enhanced by the picture we have of her vulnerability. This is a biography that, in the end, is sympathetic to Marie Curie and her science. The story of the life of Marie Curie, is familiar to many of us. Generations of Indians have read extracts from simple biographies of her as part of their school curriculum. That story, retold in the modern context and from a contemporary viewpoint, is as inspiring as it always was.