From Literary Review:
"The Elements of Marie Curie: How the Glow of Radium Lit a Path for Women in Science"
Marie Curie’s life was defined by professional triumph and personal tragedy. Ninety years after her death, she remains history’s most famous woman scientist. Curie was the first woman to receive a Nobel Prize – in 1903, she and her husband, Pierre, received the award for physics. In 1911, she was awarded a second Nobel Prize, this time for chemistry. She is still the only Nobel laureate to be garlanded in two scientific fields.
Yet after her husband’s death in a freak traffic accident in 1906, just eleven years into their marriage, she led a sorrowful and often lonely existence dedicated to continuing the work they had begun together. Meeting Curie in 1920, an American journalist described her as ‘a pale, timid little woman in a black cotton dress, with the saddest face I had ever looked upon’. She was selfless and self-effacing too. When asked to write an autobiography, Curie dictated a single paragraph: ‘I was born in Warsaw of a family of teachers. I married Pierre Curie and had two children. I have done my work in France.’
Of course, as Dava Sobel amply demonstrates in her warm, moving and effervescent biography, there is much more to Curie’s life than one staid paragraph. Born Marya Skłodowska in 1867, she left school at fifteen and – despite graduating top of her class – was barred from university on the grounds of her gender. After raising funds through teaching and learning chemistry from textbooks, she joined her sister Bronya in Paris, where she changed her name to Marie. She enrolled in the science department of the Sorbonne, becoming one of twenty-three women there among nearly two thousand men. Surviving in a bare garret on bread and eggs, she completed her degree in two years, coming first in her class, and won a postgraduate scholarship to research the magnetic properties of steel. Typically, she gave a large portion of her earnings from that research to fund a scholarship for another student.
It was at the Sorbonne that she met Pierre Curie, a quiet, gentle, serious man who had recently been made a professor in the school of industrial physics and chemistry. They married in 1895, had two daughters, Irène and Eve, and worked side by side in a cold and leaking shed investigating the new field of radioactivity (the term was coined by Marie). Together, they identified two new elements, which they named polonium and radium. As dedicated to each other as they were to their work, they forged a harmonious, equal partnership. ‘I have the best husband one could dream of’, wrote Marie, ‘and the more we live together the more we love each other’....
....MUCH MORE
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