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Marie Curie, born more than 150 years ago, is still the only female scientist many people can name. The double Nobel Prize winner is most famous for her discovery of radioactivity, as well as the radioactive elements radium and polonium. She is less well known for encouraging a generation of women who worked in her lab and went on to work in research because of the path she paved. Though few women in science have reached Curie’s level of fame and name recognition, they continue to make gains in the field because of her life and example.
In the new book The Elements of Marie Curie: How the Glow of Radium Lit a Path for Women in Science (Atlantic Monthly Press, 2024), author (and Scientific American poetry editor) Dava Sobel chronicles Curie’s life and work, and sketches biographies of many of the women who worked with her. Sobel found that few people are familiar with the network of researchers she nurtured, as well as many other aspects of the famous chemist’s history. “Everybody knows her name, but hardly anybody knows anything about her,” Sobel says.
Scientific American spoke with Sobel about Marie Curie’s contributions to science, history, and gender equality.
[An edited transcript of the interview follows.]
How did you learn about the female scientists Curie worked with?
In 2020, I was asked to review a book called Women in Their Element, a collection of essays about female chemists. The only two names I recognized to begin with were Marie Curie and her daughter [Irène Joliot-Curie]. But then as I read, I was really struck by the number of women who had spent some time with her, either studying under her or working in her lab. By the fifth or sixth one, it really started to look like a network. And through the Curie Museum in Paris, I discovered there were really at least 45 women who passed through her laboratory. She was the first woman ever to teach at the Sorbonne. And then that made her a magnet for these other women. Also, she was already world-famous because she had won the Nobel Prize, and that spread her name everywhere. So I thought, well, this is something about Madame Curie that most people don’t know, and that’s how I got started.
How did Curie end up making the huge discoveries she made?
She had extraordinary drive to get herself out of Warsaw to Paris, to be able to get an advanced education, to believe in herself that much [in the face of strong resistance toward women in science at the time], and then to be willing and able to do the kind of laboratory work that she did. And then she married the right person. She and her husband Pierre Curie worked together when she started to do her doctoral research on this new discovery of [physicist Henri] Becquerel’s, uranic rays.
This was the radiation coming from uranium decay.
Right. This was a new thing, and nobody was paying attention to it because everybody was more interested in x-rays at the time [in 1896]. And [Curie] thought she’d go after the less exciting topic; there were 1,000 papers already written about x-rays, and nobody was doing anything with uranic rays. So that was the right time.
It’s amazing to me that she entered this field at this time and then had her first child just a year later, in 1897. I’d assumed before I read the book, that the children came well after she’d established herself as a scientist.
This is a very female story. She had two children; she had a miscarriage; she had trouble nursing. Some of the women who came to her lab stopped working when they got married and had children. It’s been more than 100 years, and that’s still true for many women in science. I really wanted to meet those issues directly in the book because I think it’s so important for young women to read about other female scientists and how they managed.
Did Curie actively set out to recruit more women into science?
I don’t think she was specifically looking to hire women, but what was different about her was that she had nothing against hiring them. So that was big, and then again, she was so prominent that she attracted them and inspired them. There are a couple of women in the story who were much younger and grew up hearing about her, which made them think, “Oh, I could be a scientist, too.” And the amazing thing to me is how she still has that effect. She’s been dead for almost 100 years, but she is still an inspiration—and not just to women who go into science but women in a variety of fields.
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Polish-French physicist Marie Curie in a laboratory, circa 1905. H. Armstrong Roberts/ClassicStock/Getty Images
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