Madam Curie & a love for science

Here in Alaska where the wind does blow and the skies do cloud and the rain does fall, my 14-year-old granddaughter Sarah and I will soon be curled on the sofa watching an uncommon movie. A movie on the life of Marie Curie (formerly Maria Sklodowska) — discoverer of radium (named for the Latin word “ray”) and polonium (named for her home country Poland).

Sarah — passionate for math and science — has memorized the periodic table and begun teaching me the elements. When I asked who was the woman pictured on her poster we researched the ultra-fascinating life of Marie Curie.

Marie never would have ended up a French citizen had she not been denied advancement in education in her native Poland because she was a woman. For a time she was able to attend the Flying University (sometimes translated Floating University) — an underground school of higher learning that met secretly in various houses in Warsaw. Later she moved to France, living in a garret in poverty in order to pursue studies in physics, chemistry, and mathematics at the University of Paris.

After she married fellow scientist, Pierre Curie, her work in radioactivity (a term she coined) so interested him he quit his own research to join her. In June 1903, at age 35, Marie earned her doctorate in physics — the first female to be awarded a PhD in the history of France. Later that year she and Pierre and one other were awarded the Nobel Prize in physics for their joint research in radiation. She went on to win yet another Nobel Prize — in the field of chemistry in 1911.

When World War I broke out Marie, a widow now, realized wounded soldiers’ lives would be saved by being operated on speedily. She developed mobile radiography units which became known as “petites Curies” (little Curies), also setting up France’s first military radiology center in 1914. As many as a million soldiers were treated using her X-ray units.

I wondered if Marie’s death was associated with her radioactive studies. It turns out it was. She passed away at age 66 of aplastic anemia — attributed to extended exposure to radiation. In fact her research papers from the 1890s—and even her cookbook—are so radioactive they are kept in lead-lined boxes.

I don’t imagine any of this will scare Sarah. Marie Curie said, “It (scientific work) must be done for itself, for the beauty of science, and then there is always the chance that a scientific discovery may become like the radium a benefit for humanity.” Sarah’s in it for the beauty of the quest — and she’s not going to have to go underground to do it.

She’d like to discover a new element. Who knows, maybe she’ll name it after her grandmother.