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Episode 348: 'Treatise on Radioactivity' by Marie Curie
00:30:47
John J. Miller is joined by Dava Sobel to discuss Marie Curie's 'Treatise on Radioactivity.'
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- [00:07]
John J. Miller
Hello and welcome to the Great Books Podcast. Today we'll talk about Treatise on Radioactivity by Marie Curie. I'm your host, John J. Miller of National Review, and you're listening to a production of National Review. Our guest is Dava Sobel, whose latest book is the Elements of Marie how the Glow of Radium Lit A Path for Women in Science. She's a longtime science journalist and author whose other other books include the True Story of a Lone Genius who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of His Time, Galileo's A Historical Memoir of Science, Faith and Love and the Glass how the Ladies of the Harvard Observatory Took the Measure of the Stars. She joins us by zoom as we record from Hillsdale College's campus radio station, WRFH in Michigan. Dava, welcome to the Great Books Podcast.
- [00:58]
Dava Sobel
Thank you. I'm pleased to be with you.
- [01:00]
John J. Miller
Why is Treatise on Radioactivity by Marie Curie a great book?
- [01:05]
Dava Sobel
Marie Curie was one of the pioneers in the field of radioactivity. Such a pioneer that she actually named the field that term. Radioactive was her coinage. And this book, which came out in 1910, summarized everything that was known about radioactivity at that point. It was a big book, was published in two volumes, and it included the work of every other scientist who was working in that field, including, most notably Ernest Rutherford in England. So, yeah. Was it a bestseller? I don't know. It's extremely clear. Her writing style is excellent, but there's a lot of math in it, and personally, I don't really speak that language, so those parts were rough for me.
- [02:06]
John J. Miller
We're gonna talk about all that, the legacy of this book, its importance, the amazing scientists behind it, and I promise no math at all. David, let's start with the fact this is not her breakthrough book. In 1910, when it comes out, she's already won the Nobel Prize. She's famous certainly in the world of science, and she's about to win Nobel Prize. But take us into that moment. In 1910, who was Marie Curie and what was she doing when she wrote and published this book?
- [02:35]
Dava Sobel
She was a Polish immigrant in Paris. She had gone there to attend university, which she couldn't do in the Russian dominated part of Poland where she lived, where young women were barred from higher education. So she went to France, intending to do advance study in physics and math and then go back to her home country and become a teacher and raise the general level of scientific understanding in the country. But she met Pierre and fell in love. And although she said it was a great grief to her to remain forever in Paris. That's what she did. And they had a wonderful collaboration, a loving marriage. And in the late 1890s, working together, they discovered two new elements, radioactive elements. And Marie did her doctoral dissertation about this work that was published in 1903, the same year that she and Pierre shared the Nobel Prize in Physics with Henri Becquerel, their French colleague, who had been the first to notice that uranium gave off an unusual kind of radiation that no one had been aware of before. The three of them shared the Nobel Prize in physics, making her instantly world famous. The prize was new then. It was a big deal from the very beginning, and she was the first woman to win in any of the categories.
- [04:31]
John J. Miller
So what is radioactivity? I think of it as a bad thing. I think of cancer. I think of Chernobyl. I think of environmental disaster. What actually is it?
- [04:44]
Dava Sobel
You're right on all those points. But when it was discovered and quickly thereafter, it was seen as the cure for cancer, which it was for about two decades. So radioactivity is the release by certain elements of subatomic particles at great speed and with considerable danger to human tissue. But at the beginning, no one really recognized the danger. You'd think they would have noticed because they developed burns on their fingers, or if they carried some of the material in a pocket, they would get a burn on their body. And the medical establishment picked up on this instantly as a way to destroy cancerous tissue. So it was soon hailed as a wonderful discovery. From the discovery in 1898 to real use in medicine was just a few years. And although there were signs all along that this stuff was really noxious and dangerous, the terrifying truth didn't really come to light until the 1920s. And that's when the young women who were painting dials on watches and other instruments with paint that contained radium, something the curies never advocated. And to make a really fine tip on the paintbrush, these young women were told to dip the brush in the paint and then bring it to a fine point by passing it through their lips. As an occupational disease, they developed complete the loss of their teeth, the destruction of their jaws, and on to further bodily damage and early death.
- [06:51]
John J. Miller
How did Marie Curie come to investigate radioactivity? She could have done so many things in the lab, yet this is where her legacy certainly begins.
- [07:02]
Dava Sobel
Well, this was the hot new thing. So in 1895, X rays were discovered that was stunning. People all over the world immediately jumped on that and were studying it. The following year, 1896, Henri Becquerel discovered some other kind of radiation coming from uranium and from any compound that contained uranium. He couldn't get much attention for his discovery because everybody was so captivated by X rays, which could look through the body and expose the internal organs and bones. So Madame Curie, who was about to start her doctoral research, thought that the lesser known uranic rays would be a good subject because nobody was really looking at that. The first thing she did was try to discover what other elements, if any, emitted this strange new radiation. She discovered that there was one other. Of all the known elements, only thorium would also release this kind of radiation. And then she started testing various compounds. And very soon she found something that was far more active radioactive than either uranium or thorium. And she concluded there must be a new element, something no one has seen before, that exists in this ore that I'm studying that accounts for the excess radioactivity. And she began a search to break down the ore chemically and isolate whatever this new material was.
- [09:00]
John J. Miller
And what did she find? What was this new material?
- [09:04]
Dava Sobel
The first thing she found was something she and Pierre decided to name polonium after her native country. But they realized in the process that there were not one, but two new elements in the ore they had. And the second one they named radium for its tremendous radiating power.
- [09:31]
John J. Miller
Now, how did she get herself in a position to make these discoveries? You've mentioned she came from Poland. She must have come from a remarkable family and had an unusual education growing up.
- [09:43]
Dava Sobel
Yes. So the family was remarkable in that both the parents were teachers and they both believed in education for all the children. Marie was the youngest of five. She had an older brother and three sisters. But she had a lot of grief growing up because her mother died of tuberculosis when Marie was only 10. And one of the older sisters, who had really been the mother's nursemaid and companion, died of typhus. So these terrible losses early in her life. And she was very studious even as a young child. The others, the older ones, teased her about that. And she developed an early interest in science, which her father encouraged. And although higher education was ruled out, she went to a subversive hidden university for a while that catered to women. And then she hatched a plan with one of her older sisters so that they could both get to Paris and get educated. So the older one, Bronya, wanted to be a doctor. The boy went through university and medical school right there in Warsaw and became a doctor. But the girls had to go a different way. So Marie worked as a governess for seven Years just saving money and helping Bronya cover expenses in Paris. Bronya became a medical doctor and it returned the favor. And had Marie come and live with her in Paris and start to go to school herself.
- [11:42]
John J. Miller
How'd she choose Paris? She could have gone, I suppose, to London or New York, or really anywhere. Why Paris? Why did that place draw her?
- [11:51]
Dava Sobel
Probably it was close and it was famous and it was open to women.
- [11:56]
John J. Miller
When she got there, she met her husband. How did they meet? Who was he?
- [12:01]
Dava Sobel
She didn't meet him right away. She was doing so well in school that one of her professors got her an extracurricular assignment from the French steel industry to test different kinds of steel and see which ones made for the best magnets. Magnets were very important in electrical power generation. And a friend of hers offered to introduce her to someone who was a French scientist and was established, not really famous, but well respected, and who had done a lot of work on magnetism and put them together just to have a helpful, older, slightly older colleague. And the two of them, against their expectations, fell in love very quick and got married. And then did not work on the same things right away. Not until Marie's work got so interesting that Pierre dropped what he was doing to collaborate with her.
- [13:13]
John J. Miller
There's an old joke about Pierre Curie, that his biggest and most important discovery was Marie. Do you agree with that or were they actual partners? Was he a full collaborator with her?
- [13:26]
Dava Sobel
Yes, yes. But he had done important work with his brother before he met her. And he was a very clever inventor. He had devised several scientific instruments that were for commercial sale, and it was in the French, the Physics Society, where he was very well regarded. But he was a character. He had been homeschooled most of his life and then he was working as a teacher, but he never bothered to get his doctoral degree because he just didn't think that was important. So there was this brilliant guy working as a teacher in an industrial school and earning a salary comparable to what a factory worker earned. And it wasn't until he realized he wanted to get married that he got himself motivated and earned his doctorate and got a raise and did all of those responsible things.
- [14:31]
John J. Miller
They started a family, they had children. And Marie then, at that point, was a working mom. How did she balance her work in the lab, her scientific research, with being a wife and a mother?
- [14:45]
Dava Sobel
She had the full support of her family and his family. So Pierre considered her a full partner. They worked together in the lab and at home. And Pierre's mother died just a few weeks after Pierre And Marie's first child was born. So Pierre's father offered to move in with them and take care of the baby. He was a medical doctor, he had even delivered the baby. So he was in a very unusual position to take on this duty. And it probably helped him through his grief to have this newborn in his care. And that's how she was able to continue working. This is really a rare instance. Most women scientists today face terrific problems when they try to stay at the lab and they have a baby.
- [15:55]
John J. Miller
She took his name, her husband's name, which is not unusual, but we often refer to her as Madame P. Curie. And she even, she even bylined, treat us on radioactivity that way. Is that unusual? Are we to make anything special of that?
- [16:12]
Dava Sobel
Well, everything she did was unusual. But I think at that point she was so committed to extending his reputation and to seeing the really poorly equipped laboratory that they had shared turned into something respectable and excellent. And that's what she was doing. She was enlarging the lab, making room for other scientists in it, and making sure that his name would never be forgotten. That was of high importance to her.
- [16:56]
John J. Miller
Pierre died in 1906. How did he die? How did that change her life and the lives of their children?
- [17:03]
Dava Sobel
He died very suddenly in an accident crossing the street, was hit by a very heavy wagon, horse drawn wagon. And once again, terrible grief overcame her. And she was a widow at age 38. And because of their collaboration and her position in the lab, the faculty at the Sorbonne, the University of Paris, realized that she was the only person really capable of taking over the lab. And they actually invited her to do that and to take over the teaching of Pierre's courses, his university course in physics. And that made her the first ever woman to teach at that ancient university. So she's already a Nobel Prize winner and now she is in this unique position. And that drew all sorts of attention, including women in other countries seeing her as a beacon and wanting to learn this new science and trying to get to Paris and into her lab.
- [18:31]
John J. Miller
She was an inspiration and mentor then to many other scientists, especially women. How did she, how did she come to perform this role? And who did she inspire?
- [18:40]
Dava Sobel
The circumstances of Pierre's death really put her in a even more unique position than she'd been in before as a Nobel Prize winning physicist. Now she has control of a laboratory and she has say over who gets to work there. So women were drawn to her from all over, and there are statistics of that. She welcomed about 45 women into her lab between the Year of Pierre's death, 1906, and her own death in 1934. And far and away the most distinguished of those women was her own daughter, Irene, who was seen as very like her father, in temperament and very close to her mother. And then they worked together and Irene went on to win her own Nobel Prize in chemistry in 1935. So Marie was inspirational to women all over the world, and she still is. It's very surprising to me how many young women will name her even though she's been dead 90 years. Not just women, men, and not just scientists, but people in a variety of fields who see her as inspirational, not just because of what she did as a physicist or chemist, but because of her attitude, her refusal to let circumstances get in her way, her way of rising to the occasion. I think one of the things that stunned me the most in her extraordinary life was her reaction to the outbreak of World War I. And that was to recognize immediately that this was the first war where X ray examination of battle wounds would be possible. So she got someone to give her a car. She didn't know how to drive, but she learned. And she outfitted this vehicle with mobile X ray unit of her own design and drove to the front. Later she involved her 17 year old daughter in the work and she had to fight the army. She even had to fight the field hospital surgeons because they weren't familiar with X rays and they didn't understand how helpful that would be until she demonstrated it. And then they were instant converts. So then to increase the supply of these X ray technicians, she devised a course, a six week crash course for women where they could learn electricity, X ray use and human anatomy. And she trained one hundred and fifty ordinary French women, not science specialists, just people really wanting to help the war effort. 150 of them went out in similarly outfitted vans or they worked at field hospitals as X ray technicians. So that sense of whatever it is, I'm going to, I'm going to figure out how to do what I intend to do anyway.
- [22:20]
John J. Miller
What's the importance of women in science? And what I mean is we all want great science, we want the best science. And having women engage in science obviously brings more brain power to the field and so forth. But do women bring something unique, some special quality to scientific research?
- [22:37]
Dava Sobel
Maybe, maybe any individual brings a unique perspective. Certainly having a mix of backgrounds in the laboratory, whether it's by sex or by culture, country of origin could be any number of things. But there is a sense that women do science differently and in a negative way, there's a very tired trope that in the lab, the scut work gets foisted on the women. The men do the interesting creative work and the women do the dull, repetitive things that the men don't want to be bothered with. And this is a gross distortion. Science is full of repetition and everybody does it. It's the only way you can demonstrate that what you say is happening is actually happening. So I don't really want to make a distinction between men scientists and women scientists, except to say that women scientists have a harder time breaking in because of age old prejudices.
- [23:54]
John J. Miller
We might also say that Marie Curie is the greatest female scientist of all time, or the greatest woman scientists. Maybe the most famous. When I do think of who are the most famous or best known scientists, I think of Jane Goodall, maybe Jennifer Doudna on her own time and so forth. But is Marie Curie, is she the most famous? Is she the best?
- [24:16]
Dava Sobel
Well, she's certainly the most famous. And part of that is the two Nobel Prizes. Because although other. A few other people have won two Nobel Prizes, nobody has ever won in both physics and chemistry, except for her. So that gives her a distinction. Yum, yum, yum, yum. Is she the best? Well, she did great work. But is that even a question that can be answered? Especially when you're talking about people in different fields, as different as Jane Goodall in the field studying chimpanzees, or Jennifer Doudna in the laboratory discovering crispr? These are very different kinds of work. So they're all great would be my answer. The thing I want to stress is that Madame Curie, although she's the most famous, and though she's often the only one that a person can name, she was never the only one and she didn't want to be.
- [25:23]
John J. Miller
She investigated radioactivity. Was her own health ever at risk? I've read that her old cookbooks are in fact radioactive. They're dangerous to go through. Should add that she lived to the age of 66, so she had a life of a normal length. But did she put her own house at risk to study radioactivity?
- [25:42]
Dava Sobel
Absolutely she did. And she ignored the science because the science was so interesting. She really didn't want to attribute her early cataracts. Her hands were scarred from handling the materials. She had many health problems that she often thought, and she would say as much in letters to her family. Maybe this has something to do with the work, but if I take a few days off, I feel fine. Early in the 1920s, the serious scientists began testing everyone in the lab, giving them blood tests to see if the exposure was having a negative effect. And if their blood counts were low, they would tell them to take some time off, you know, go be out in the fresh air, exercise, and then come back to work. And that's what people did. So they weren't aware or they didn't want to know. And I think that's something that anyone who's been on the trail of a fascinating scientific discovery is empathize with. Yeah, even it's dangerous, sure. But look what we're learning. Look at these discoveries, getting at the nature of matter. I mean, that's what came out of it all, was the understanding of the atom, the structure of the atom. They filled in the periodic table, which had been just a work in progress. All sorts of discoveries followed on what was originally called uranic rays.
- [27:34]
John J. Miller
Your new book is called the Elements of Marie Curie. How the Glow of Radium Lit a Path for Women in Science. And you're a longtime science journalist and science writer. Your book Longitude on the Scientist John Harrison is so good. But what drew you to this topic? Now, why did you pick her for your subject?
- [27:55]
Dava Sobel
Today, I am newly sensitized. I'm embarrassed to say how long it took me to become aware of the issue of women in science and how many barriers women have to get over. And so I'm 77, and it wasn't till the writing of my previous book, the Glass Universe, that I finally got it, that, oh, yeah, there are. There are all sorts of negative attitudes, impediments holding women, barring them from the laboratory. So I wanted to look at other stories about women in science. And at first, I was not interested in Madame Curie because everybody's heard of her. Be much better to find someone nobody has heard of. But then I Learned about the 45 women in her laboratory, and that was something that was not known about her. And that seemed to really make the point that women have always been interested in science and they've always been in there. Even if their names haven't appeared on the published papers or the prize citations, they've been there.
- [29:18]
John J. Miller
One more question, Deva. What special lessons does the life and legacy of Marie Curie have for us today in the 2000s?
- [29:27]
Dava Sobel
I like to say that she had laboratory daughters, that she showed that if you open the door and let the women come in and do the science, they'll do it and do it well. And I think she remains inspirational to people. And in these extremely contentious times, it's nice to have someone to point to who continues to inspire people. I just recently met a young woman at the University of Wisconsin who told me she had read about Madame Curie when she was five years old and she decided then and there to be a chemist. And she had just enrolled at University of Wisconsin, Madison as a chemistry major.
- [30:21]
John J. Miller
Davis Sobel, thanks so much for joining us and telling us all about Treatise on Radioactivity by Marie Curie.
- [30:27]
Dava Sobel
Thank you.
- [30:28]
John J. Miller
You've just listened to the Great Books Podcast, a production of National Review. Please subscribe to the Great Books Podcast and leave reviews of the show that helps us keep this podcast going. Send me your ideas for future episodes. You can reach me through our website@heymiller.com on Twitter. My handle is at hey Miller. Last of all, special thanks to all of you for listening. We'll be back next week. The new episode of the Great Books Podcast.