February 22, 2021 • 52 mins
Marie Curie discovered two elements and radioactivity while enduring deep clinical depressions, even as the sexism of the time tried to deny her the 2 nobel prizes she won.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Personology is a production of I Heart Radio. Marie Currey
was a Polish French physicist and chemist who discovered the
theory of radioactivity, as well as two new elements, polonium
and radium. She was the first woman to win a
(00:22):
Nobel Prize, the first person and only woman to win twice,
and the only person to win a Nobel Prize in
two different scientific fields. My guest today is Daniel Whitson.
He is a professor of Experimental particle physics at the
University of California, Irvine and a fellow of the American
(00:44):
Physical Society. He conducts research using the Large Hadron Collider
at CERN. He is the co host of Daniel and
Jorge Explain the Universe, a fun filled discussion of the
big mind blowing unanswered questions about the universe. Beginning at
the beginning in eighteen sixty seven. Marie Carey, who was
(01:08):
actually born Mania or Maria, but they called her Mania Swardowska.
I'm probably mangling that, but I believe that's how it's pronounced,
was born in Warsaw, which had been Poland but had
recently been taken over by Russia. Essentially, and this was
(01:29):
really important because in terms of the culture and the
emotional state of her family, her mother and father being
not only Polish but really nationalistically Polish, and that being
very important to them. This was a painful time and
it came with a lot of restrictions for them in
(01:52):
terms of what they could do, and it really influenced
the way they handled the raising of their children. That's right.
They had these very strong values about the importance of
Polishness and Poland as a country, and also about education.
I mean, her parents were both teachers, and they really
wanted young Marie or Mania to understand physics and mathematics
(02:15):
and to have a brain in her From lots of perspectives,
they really seemed sort of like modern, forward thinking people
to educate their children to value education, and that really
was forward thinking because as a girl, many families didn't
expect girls to be educated or do much of anything.
But the difference in this family was first of all,
(02:35):
that her mother had been, as you said, an educator,
was head of a private school for women, specifically, so
a not only an educator herself, but an educator of women.
So that was important to her. And clearly the father
married her, so he was more than accepting of this,
and interestingly, he was a physicist himself. Math and physics
(02:59):
was in his opinion, the most important subject, but more
so than that practical math and physics and there it's
not just theoretical, but what could you do with it.
It needed to have application that would turn out to
be really formative and important. For Maria, I feel a
little bit judged there, you know, because the kind of
(03:21):
physics that I do is particle physics. It's sort of
extreme on the edge of uselessness. So I'm not sure
that I would agree with marie curious father about the
value of applied physics. But I think that all science
is valuable, and most importantly, it's just important to teach
your kids to think critically and think scientifically. Think about
how many incredible geniuses in history have contributed to humanity
(03:42):
because their parents insisted on their education, you know, especially
when they broke with tradition the first person in their
family to get an education. Makes me wonder how many
people out there didn't get an education and could have
changed history. Absolutely, Because of course, even though she had
these parent educators, in some ways, she was an unlikely
(04:02):
suspect in the sense that because of what happened in
terms of Russia moving in, they could barely make ends meet.
So even though they were both educators, the mother had
lost her job, she had to move to a lower school,
a lesser school, and certainly a non paying or a
much less paying situation. And the father also fell on
(04:23):
hard times, was paid less for the kind of educating
that he was doing. And in addition to that, there
was a good deal of trauma that happened in this
family early on that we should talk about that also
would make staying focused on education difficult and being a
student difficult. Everything from witnessing Russian soldiers come in and
(04:48):
really commit atrocities to Polish nationals who were trying to
essentially stick up for themselves. These events that occurred were
disturbing to Maria. She remembers them. She she cited them
in letters and so on. And the economic struggles meant
that there was only so much schooling one could afford, essentially,
(05:09):
and this had the potential to limit what happened with
the children working after the parents doing really everything they could.
And there was one small silver lining there that the
Russians came in and they, for example, they said no
more lab instruction in Polish schools. They didn't want to,
They didn't care too much about the education of the
Polish students, and so Marie's father was forced to bring
(05:31):
home all of his awesome lab equipment that he used
to use in the school, which men of course that
he got to teach his kids how to do physics experiments.
So she indirectly actually benefited from the sort of Russian
oppression of Polish education. So no doubt this made an
early impact on her, just the engagement in being able
to do these kinds of lab experiments and being excited
(05:52):
about the equipment, and developing a passion herself, not just
her father's passion, but her own passion for the science. Unfortunately,
also as a young person, her mother developed tuberculosis and
therefore was really not only sickly, but kept her distance
(06:14):
from Marie because even though it was sort of pre
the well understanding that tb was passed communally, she had
enough of a sense that she tried to sort of
keep a distance, be less touchy. And in fact, Marie
is noted for saying, at some point I never felt
a mother's kiss that specifically the physical affection. Yeah, that
(06:34):
it was really sad, but it was really her mother's
attempt to spare her daughter and her family. And also
there were these absences of the mother where she would
go to the classic sort of sanatorium, which was the
only treatment they had at the time, go away rest
to some sort of spa like treatment. They weren't fun
spats like today his spats, but you know, some sort
of resting treatment in the mountains where the air was
(06:56):
supposedly better, and she would go away for periods of time.
So it Maria had a sense of abandonment essentially, and
take one of her younger sisters there were multiple sisters,
but Josiah went for cures with her mother. She also
was a sickly child. So there was sort of a dearth,
I guess, I say of parental attention in certain ways.
(07:19):
The more present parent was actually the father who was
teaching and you know who ultimately had to move to
a boarding school that he housed in his home because
essentially he lost his job and that was the only
way to make money to bring students to his home
create like an in home boarding school. So Maria has
(07:39):
these memories of you know, sleeping on the floor, sleeping wherever,
uh not having enough food, trying to literally get by
in this very crowded circumstance so that the family could
make ends meet. And I wonder if this is part
of what gives her her passion for science that we
see through her entire life. If she feels like Biken
(08:00):
ducting experiments, by studying the universe, maybe you could gain
some power over it. You could develop some new tool
that could help cure some sickness, or help some people,
or really change the fundamental characteristics of your life. Because
she went through all these struggles as a kid, feeling
powerless over all these large forces that controlled the shape
of her life. Absolutely, I do think psychologically it did
(08:23):
even unconsciously have such an impact because we know, and
we'll talk about this later, that the discovery she makes
she channels practically speaking, practical as her father would say,
it was important into applications that did have potential for
curative or supposedly curative effect, but certainly medical treatment. And
(08:43):
that was clearly consciously or unconsciously important to her. So,
perhaps motivated by what happened with her mother and what
happened with her sister, her mother dies when Marie is
only ten, So you can imagine that that loss would
psychologically be very prmative. But let's talk for a minute
about the fact that she was already very bright, clearly
(09:05):
very bright. It wasn't just that her father was feeding
her this stuff or teaching her this stuff. At age
four she started reading Yeah, wow, exactly today we would
be like wow, what, but certainly with as little education
as there was available until at least later than that.
It's a real While she is known to have said
(09:26):
I didn't mean to do it, she did it in
a setting that was potentially embarrassing to the family members
that she was with who weren't reading. So she caught
onto that and said, I didn't need to do it,
but it was so easy that I couldn't help it.
I'm sorry. And her father saw that and he started
giving her math problems. So at a very early age
(09:49):
she was already doing math of various sorts, which set
her up for school to be really a very thriving student.
And it seems to be a theme in her if
also the things just sort of came easily to her,
you know. She took on difficult problems and solved them,
and then later on in her scientific career, she made,
you know, all sorts of discovery show and two Nobel prizes,
(10:12):
just like a woman of great intellectual heft. It's it's impressive.
I would have loved to have talked to her. You
might have loved to have talked to her, but you
would have had to probably only talked to her about science,
as we will see later, because that was her passion
and that was her interest, and most other things didn't
interest her as much. She did, of course, attend and
(10:34):
graduate high school, but she graduated the age of fifteen,
not surprising, just because she was really so bright and accelerated.
And then her family, her father sends her to live
with the mother's family when she graduates because frankly, there
isn't much going on. They don't have the money to
send her directly to university. So in this interim period
(10:59):
she go is to live with the mother's extended family
to basically have fun, have a little bit of what
life should be like for an adolescent woman at that time.
And the mother's family is more well off, so she
gets to attend dances and have social interactions, and she
(11:20):
goes fishing, and she actually experiences interestingly and it's notable
at this time her first depression because even though she
gets pulled out of it by being in this happy environment,
when she first moves away from her family her father,
I guess I should say in the remaining siblings, she
has her first experience of saying she feels incredibly down.
(11:42):
She talks about her sadness and feeling that it's difficult
to move or have energy, and really describes the classic
symptoms of a first major depression. That's important because teenage
years are typically the first presentation of major depression, and
someone who's going to have were current major depression. And
sadly Marie does have recurrent major depression, but this seems
(12:05):
to have been the first one. And it makes some
sense because she plows through school, she ends up with
a gold medal. She probably is the kind of person
who defined herself somewhat by her academic achievements, by what
she's learned and the meaning of it all. And so
then to have nowhere to go essentially afterwards, because the
opportunities don't exist there for women must have been frustrating.
(12:25):
It's a friction against you know, her identity absolutely, And
she makes a deal with her sister Branya, who wants
to go to medical school, that she will work and
help her sister get through medical school in Paris, which,
by the way, was the choice because it was one
of the only places that would accept women and that
(12:47):
medical school didn't cost money, so Branya could do that
and for her living expenses. Marie helped her by taking
a job essentially as a nanny for an intellectual errorist
aocratic family, which was not an unusual thing to do,
and sort of nanny tudor. And she falls in love
(13:07):
with the son of the family. This is her first love.
The son also falls in love with her, and they
go to the parents and say, we'd like to get married,
and of course the parents say, are you kidding me?
Absolutely not, you are not marrying a lower class woman
with no money. This whole part of her life to
(13:28):
me feels like a Jane Austin novel. You know, this
deal with her sister. First, you get an education than
I do. And she falls in love with the guy,
but the family say no, I mean it's all there's
so much rich drama there. It's amazing. It is like
a Jane Austin hoffl. Absolutely a Polish Russian Jane Austin novel,
but but it really is. And in that setting of
(13:48):
the son saying, oh, you'll disinherit me if I marry her. Okay,
never mind, then she experiences another depression. It's another loss.
It's important to understand and that when someone has had
early life loss like a mother dying at age ten
and a sister dying shortly thereafter, future losses or abandonments,
(14:09):
even if they're not a death, even if their breakup,
can bring back the same kind of trauma, traumatic feelings,
and cause one to experience a depression. So she really
stopped functioning at that point, and it took her a
while to recover. Of course, there was there were no
medications at that time, no particular treatments for depression. But
she did ultimately recover and it did resolve, and her
(14:33):
sister made her way and her partner also, like Zorowski,
the man she fell in love with, I think it
was tragic as well for him. I read these stories
that years later he became a famous mathematician. Years later
he would sit in front of a statue of Murray
Cury and sort of think about what life might have
been like if they had been married. So that's interesting
he became a professor himself. Yeah, he was gifted in
(14:55):
mathematics and he became a, you know, a very well
known professor. So do you know, overshadowed of course by
the giant that is Marie Curry. In any other sort
of time period, he would have been very well known.
But it's hard to measure up to that standard. Wow.
So that's fascinating and I'm sure that contributes. You know,
a person like Marie Curry is going to be attracted
to somebody else who has sort of the same intellectual
(15:16):
interests and intellectual passion and the desire to understand and
take puzzles apart. So it makes perfect sense that the
person she would fall in love with would also be
somebody who wanted to unravel the secrets of the universe,
and she would go on to do that. Again. Clearly,
when she was feeling better and this had resolved and
she had gotten over this, around the age of twenty three,
(15:38):
her sister finished medical school and tells Mania to come
to Paris, that she needs to start her education and
that Rony will help her. This is her element now, right,
She essentially is going on to graduate school or you know,
university and graduate work. Her father advises her, remember, I
(15:59):
want you to do sign aience that's practical. I guess
that's not what your father did, but that's what her
father did, and so that was the mandate, Like you
go on and do this, but do something that's practical.
So she studies at the Saubant in Paris, and she
decides that after her previous experience with men, which took
up her emotional time, energy and caused her to feel depressed,
(16:20):
that she would swear off men. So she was completely
committed to the lab, to the study, and then she
meets Pierre. Well, you know there are men everywhere, right,
especially in science. A hundred years ago, it's dominated by men,
and so it's difficult to do science, to be a
serious academic without being, you know, the only woman or
(16:42):
one of few women around. It's unfortunately something that hasn't
changed enough. It is still a field dominated by male academics.
In fact, she was getting her master's in physics and
math and she was one of three women out of
two thousand students. So when you say male dominated, your
right on that. It was highly unusual. And of course
(17:03):
when there are only three women around in two thousand men. Yes,
you would get a fair amount of mail attention, and
think about the fortitude it took to continue. You know,
back then, it's not like there were only three women
out of two thousand because women weren't interested, you know,
it was not something that was supported. Families were not
encouraging it, the other students probably trying to push them out.
It's difficult for women today to survive the academic climate
(17:26):
because it is sort of biased towards men and populated
mostly by men. But a hundred years ago it must
have been so much more difficult. It must have taken
like a real desire and passion to climb this mountain
and make the achievements that she did in that climate
a hundred years ago. Let's take a quick break here.
We'll be back in a moment. From the evidence we have,
(17:46):
we don't see any writings that really indicate that she
was pained by this, but rather that she was simply determined,
and that in a way she had emotional blinders on
that she she saw which you wanted to do, and
she was really unconcerned about what other people in general
thought of her, save for perhaps her father and her siblings.
(18:10):
Her family did matter to her, but she was otherwise
unconcerned and in that sense chose to live in a dank,
cold sounded almost like a cell, where she would have
no other interests or comforts, and purposely to do nothing
but focus on the math and the physics, to not socialized,
(18:34):
to not be concerned with having friends or concerned with
certainly having a boyfriend. And interestingly, Pierre Curie, who was
a colleague, let's say, was also fairly esthetic. He was
also a man consumed by his work, by the math
and physics. In fact, he's known to have said that
(18:56):
he essentially was uninterested in women and getting involved with
a woman because they could quote, you know, suck the
intellectual energy from you. And that was you know, in
the words family and marriage. It was not what he
was after. He didn't want to be bogged down with
emotional things. So he was also equally focused on his work.
(19:17):
And so it's quite amazing that the two of them
should start to work together. And ultimately it was really
he that changed his mind. It was he that proposed
that perhaps they could be emotionally involved, that perhaps they
could get married. She says, in fact, she really did
not fall in love with Pierre Curie until her honeymoon.
(19:40):
She agreed to get married to him because he had
really convinced her that they would make a great partnership.
It was a scientific couple. They were thinking, think about
the things we could discover together, think about the mysteries
we could unravel, and that's sort of romantic in a
very unusual way. They're supporting each other, encouraging each other,
(20:01):
sort of resonating with each other, but not in the
way that you know most couple to do. Absolutely, and
of course Pierre had as a man, he did have
access to certain things, the lab equipment, things that she wanted,
and he did offer really to include her and to
promote her work and let her partake of the advantages
(20:24):
that he had as a man in the field, and
that allowed her to do the work that she wanted to.
That was very important. It was very important to her,
but it ended up being important to both of them.
Can you describe a little bit the kind of work
that they really embarked on together from a scientific point
of view. Yeah, And before he met Marie, he actually
(20:44):
had an impressive track record of research on his own
and with other collaborators, which he set aside almost entirely
to focus on the questions that Marie wanted to ask.
He's the person who discovered Piazzo electronics, this property of
crystals that if you put electricity or with them, they squeeze,
or if you squeeze or crystal you can generate electricity.
(21:05):
So he had discovered that years earlier and been doing
research on magnetism and crystals. But Pierre and Marie were
forming their scientific collaboration at a very exciting time in physics.
Just a few years earlier, we had discovered the first particle,
the electron, and all sorts of things were being discovered.
X rays had been discovered in and so there was
(21:27):
an exciting moment. It was this feeling that like we
were going to crack open the nature of matter and
finally figure out what everything was made out of. And
remember also at this time people didn't know like what
the atom was and what it was made out of
and what was inside of it. Pierre was kind of
known for designing delicate equipment, right like the electrometer, this
(21:48):
very precise or for the time precise and delicate equipment,
and he brought her in. She was commissioned to weigh
metals so to work with matter, and it was the
joining of these two things. I mean, yes, I guess
he had to diverge from exactly what he had been
working on. But together she continued to weigh metals, but
(22:10):
it became more about the metals, right, and the properties
of the metals that they ultimately began working on together,
that's right. And they used these very precise instruments that
he developed, specifically the electrometer electrometer or something that measures
how much electrical current can pass through something, that essentially
the potential across something. And they were using this essentially
(22:30):
to explore radiation because these X ray had been discovered recently,
so people were aware of the idea that there might
be like invisible particles shooting through space. But then a
year later and Rebeccarell discovered that uranium also gives out
some kind of ray, So we discovered X rays. Now
we discovered these weird uranium rays, and the whole world
(22:53):
was sort of a blaze with interest in X rays,
and not as nearly as many people were studying these
uranium rays. So what Marine and Pierre did, which was
interesting and fascinating, is that they measured the effect of
these uranium rays on the air. They showed that these
uranium rays, whatever this thing was that was coming out
of uranium, was making the air, so we could conduct
(23:14):
electricity just like a really small amount. And so that's
why it was crucial that they used this device that
Pierre invented this electrometer, and so that was the first
discovery that they made together. So in a way, they
really kind of invented what's called courts technology. Right. The
courts became like the big deal around that time. And
(23:36):
wasn't that like used to power general things that we
were interested in, like watches and other machinery essentially that
was important to use. That's right. These Pizzo electrical crystals
are very important even today. We used them in all
sorts of devices. You know, every time you push a
button on your barbecue, for example, that little clicker that
(24:00):
lights the fire, that's po electronics and so these things
are everywhere, and they're used to do very precise location
of very small devices and to generate electricity from motion,
and so yeah, they're they're certainly very important. One thing
that's really notable about Marie's work even at this time
is that she would do an experiment over and over
(24:22):
and over again. She was known to do the same
experiment like forty times. One might call that as a
mental health professional obsessive. On the plus side, certainly she
was persistent, right, and it is important to repeat your
data collection over and over again to make sure that
(24:44):
it's accurate. But she was really obsessive about accuracy and
repeating and repeating something that might drive another person kind
of nuts, like enough, already we did this, however many
we've already done this there any times, we don't need
another ten times. But she really continued and that actually
ended up being very valuable trait in terms of doing
(25:09):
the kind of science that they were doing together. It
certainly did and later on in their life they need
to purify these materials to get pure samples of the
radioactive elements, and that took a lot of work, and
she would just do it and do it and do it.
She was something of a lab rat. So there was
this I don't know what you call it crystals or
what is pitch blend exactly, because you manually collected pitch
(25:30):
blend for these experiments, right. Pitch Blend is a radioactive
uranium rich mineral and ore and it has oxygen and
uraneum in it, and it's something that was extracted during
mining processes, and she could get vast quantities of this stuff,
and she studied it and understood its radioactive processes, that
it generated these currents in the air nearby, and it
(25:53):
didn't seem to matter if it was in a solid
form or a powder form, if it was wet or
if it was dry. And this is what really gave
her this inside that like maybe it was something inside.
There's something inside these atoms that was happening. This is
the beginning of the creation of this idea that atoms
were not like indivisible little blocks, that they were built
(26:15):
out of smaller things so that they could, you know,
therefore change, they could like fall apart, they could shoot
out little pieces of themselves. And so pitch blend has
uranium in it and it decays radioactively, and so it
shoots out these little bits and has inside of it
what we now know as radium. So this everybody got
very excited about radium. If you look back at advertisements,
(26:38):
even for for all kinds of products, there was sort
of this wow radium, you know, almost advertising radium in
weird non sequiturs, but as part of something that you
could somehow get or own or would make life better.
Certainly there was a lot of excitement about it, clearly
following as you mentioned earlier, that Marie and Pierre Enri
(27:00):
Bocharrell won the Nobel Prize. This Nobel Prize, I think
it's really important. First of all, they didn't want to
give the Nobel Prize to Marie. They really just wanted
to give the Nobel Prize to Pierre and Enri Bascharrell.
And it was Pierre that said, I will not accept
this prize unless my wife also gets this prize. Because
she did the lion's share of the work. That's astonishing.
(27:24):
Today even I would say that would be pretty astonishing.
But just goes to show the old adage that it
often is who you marry and how supportive they are
of your career that is a big determinant of your successes.
But in this case, he more than supported her, he
(27:44):
pointed out, and it was true that actually she in
some ways did more of the work than he did
and was more deserving of the prize. But at that
time it was unheard of for a woman to win.
I mean, she was the first woman to win, as
we'll explain later, or she goes on to be not
only the first woman to win Nobel Prize, but the
first woman to win two Nobel Prizes and the only
(28:08):
person male or female to win two Nobel Prizes in
two different science areas. So this first prize was in physics,
and she was able to go and was able to
receive her prize, but had to sit in the front
of the audience and not be on stage to receive
(28:29):
her prize. Again, a lot of effort to push back
and deny her the prize, but this ensured her a
place really scientifically at least with her university and in
her ability to continue on and do the work and
that she did. And that's something that's that's happening already
here which I think is fascinating, is that both Pierre
(28:50):
and Marie are having health issues. Like they're doing all
this work in the lab, they're studying radiation, and they're
so smart and there's so intelligent, but they're not making
a connect action between this radiation that they're working with
and their own health. And when doing this research, Marie
lost like twenty pounds while doing this research, and both
of them had like permanent damage in their fingertips because
(29:12):
they were touching radioactive substances, and throughout their whole lives
they never really made this connection. Well, you know, it's interesting.
I want to argue that at least consciously, they don't
record making this connection. But I would tell you that
perhaps unconsciously, given the fact that they did things like
keep a little teeny bit of radium and a test
(29:33):
tube in their pocket next to their skin and see
an open sore form, there was such hard evidence that
it would be impossible to not register it on any level.
And I would argue that it fits with her lifelong
commitment to living in this totally abstemious way with no
(29:57):
comforts of any sort. I guess I make in the
argument that in addition to having recurrent depression, Marie Carey
was pretty masochistic. She was a massochistic woman. She really
indulged in tremendous suffering, and of course she felt that
her suffering was for her work, and it was for
her work, but it was acceptable to the point of
(30:19):
one must wonder if she was not drawn to this
type of behavior. And as you point out, importantly, not
only did they suffer from these terrible effects of radium.
But along the way they had two daughters. Marie really
did not love being a mother. She was really much
more passionate about the science. She loved her daughters, She
(30:39):
clearly loved her daughters, but she didn't love mothering. So
she had this constant setup of not mothering or letting
them do a lot of their own growing up and
figuring it out and not being as present and feeling
guilty about it, constantly guilty and recording her guilt, and
that being a conflict for her. But in that since
(31:00):
also she's a very modern woman, right, she had kids, yes,
but then she went back to the lab. And that's
what a lot of women scientists do these days. They
have both. And so she's six years ahead of her
time in the sense of thinking that she can have
this role as a woman, being a mother but also
be a scientist, that she can do both things. It's
(31:21):
really incredible. It is extraordinary and highly unusual. Her oldest daughter, Irene,
becomes a scientist as well ultimately, and in fact, Irene
often says that she was drawn to science because it
was a way of bonding with her mother, and her
mother would be interested in her and talked to her
about science, and that is the path she chose. The
younger daughter, l ultimately became a journalist, was an incredible pianist,
(31:45):
but had a harder time with the distance that she felt.
Both girls report loving their mother and their mother loving them,
but their mother was basically a workaholic, very very dedicated
to her science. So yes, you point out they become sicker,
they're cold, they're hungry, they're tired, sleep isn't important. They
(32:05):
don't take care of themselves, all in the name of science.
And I also think, in juxtaposition to her children's sort
of interesting to think about her naming and discovery of
radium and polonium, that she named polonium after Poland. Her
still her nationalistic feelings about Poland, but like these became
her children, radium and polonium were her kids as opposed
(32:29):
to her kids. That is the kind of dedication that
she felt. You think if you went over to dinner
at Marie Cury's house, should introduce you to her elements
before she introduced you to her children. I think that
is likely, And I think that if she happened to
serve you up something that gave you radiation poisoning, you know, bummer.
But that was also a real possibility because, as she
pointed out consciously, she wasn't aware of that, but that
(32:51):
was her pride and enjoying the thing that she would
want to show you. Sadly, Pierre is killed at the
age of forty nine while they are working. He is
out walking, he falls, a wagon apparently rolls over him
and crushes him, and this throws her into yet another
terrible depression because by now she deeply loves Pierre and
(33:14):
he is her partner and everything. And she cites interestingly
that her work, in her opinion, is what pulls her
out of depression this time, that she is so depressed,
but by working she can slowly, bit by bit, find
her way out of feeling so depressed. She's so depressed
that she really doesn't care for the kids at all.
(33:34):
At this point, Pierre's father takes the children. He understands
her that she has to be working. It's like work
as therapy. Right. If you've ever had a time in
your life when you had a personal tragedy, sometimes just
throwing yourself into a project or something totally different can
help distract you from it and build up those mental rhythms,
and I've never had a tragedy the skill that Marie
(33:56):
Curi has suffered, but I certainly understand how that can
be a salve in those difficult moments, a salve and
for her because it was such a passion it probably
even in terms of neurochemicals and the dopamine reward system
in the brain, when you're involved in something that you
are excited about and passionate about, would give you basically
(34:17):
a boost in terms of your neurotransmitter. So it really
biologically may have helped pull her out of the depression
because at this point, she's really onto radium as a
potential cure, having potential practical uses, and even though very
upsetting things are happening along the way, like she's denied
(34:38):
entry to the Academy of Sciences as a Nobel Prize
winner because she's a woman. Basically Einstein has, even though
he had great respect for her work, called her cold
as a heron she's not exactly getting warm receptions from
the scientific community. But what the pursuit of radium as
(35:03):
a cure and the work around these substances really galvanizes
her and she keeps moving forward and this again, it's
fascinating because she's aware of radium's medical consequences. She creates
these tubes of radium, she brings them to doctors. Doctors
use them to destroy damage tissue, but she must therefore
(35:23):
be aware of the fact that radium could also be
damaging her tissue. So I think it's fascinating because she
must have had this cognitive distance in her mind. Clearly,
a woman of grading intellect has all the pieces in
place in her head. I think you're probably right. She
doesn't want to see the consequences, or she doesn't want
to say to herself what it would mean, because it
would mean that she couldn't be doing this research anymore.
(35:44):
It certainly was not safe and it definitely sped her
death absolutely. What about her second Nobel Prize, She wins
it in chemistry, they awarded the prize, and then because
at this point it's been a while since Pierre's and
she has taken up romantically with one of Pierre's students,
(36:06):
Paul Langevin, also a researcher, also with that intellect that
would draw her in. She has really what describes kind
of a fiery affair with him, but unfortunately he's married.
This is not a tremendous consequence to her. His marriage
apparently is not a healthy marriage according to him. But
(36:28):
of course it's not he that is punished. It is
always in those days the woman who has seen as
the home wrecker. And so when this comes out, because
Paul Langavin's wife finds out and publicly announces what has happened,
in an effort to in fact destroy them both, the
(36:49):
Nobel Committee, even though they have awarded her the medal,
tries to say, don't come. We don't want you to
come and collect this. It looks bad for us. This
is so absurd. I mean, compare for example, to Einstein,
who's done so much worth. The mistakes he made in
his personal life are just horrendous. But you know, it's
hardly even known. So to even have this like quote
(37:12):
unquote scandal attached to her name and her scientific legacy
feels unfair, quite unfair. Absolutely, It's amazing to me that
even with this recurrent attempt to deny her, she will
not be stopped. This woman's resilience, her grit and determination
is at least as admirable to me as her intellect,
(37:35):
which is, you know, bar none. Let's take a quick
break here. We'll be back in a moment. Can you
describe a little bit the second Nobel Prize what it
was essentially awarded for. So the nineteen eleven Nobel Prize
that she wins in chemistry, she wins is for producing
radium and radium and lots of promising applications in medicine
(37:55):
and in all sorts of stuff. And radium was really
difficult to come by this pitch blend, and uranium in
the pitch blend would radioactively decay to radium, but there
were really tiny, tiny quantities, and so assembling this stuff,
proving that radium was its own thing and not just
like some weird version of other things we already knew
(38:16):
in a chemical combination was really what she won the
Nobel Prize for. And you have to remember back then
people thought of elements as like each thing was its own.
Gold was gold and lead was lead, and even though
people have been trying for hundreds of years, you couldn't
turn lead into gold. And so what radio activity did
was really break that. It showed that one thing really
could turn into another. It was the advent of honest
(38:39):
modern day alchemy, which is now like a real science.
We do this all the time in particle physics, and
so uranium would turn into radium or into thorium, orn't
one of these other elements, And so this was a
big deal. And this is back in the day when
even just discovering a new element that was enough to
cement your place in history, because it was a new
(38:59):
kind of England nobody had ever seen before. And so
that's what she won the nineteen eleven Prize and Chemistry
for producing radium, which was chemically very difficult to extract
from the pitch blend. So and she also made the
point at that juncture that hey, one's personal life should
have nothing to do with one's work life and work recognition,
(39:21):
something that actually wasn't a problem for men any way,
generally speaking, but obviously it was a problem for women,
a unique statement for that time, believe it or not.
Shortly after this time that the World War broke out
and she decides to use the radium which she has
now basically figured out how to create small stations to
(39:45):
do X rays and to therefore be able to do
X rays in the field. This is actually departure from
the work that she had been doing right it's something different,
another creation, another creative and practical use of science. She
designs these cards, they're called petitue curies. At the end
(40:05):
of the day, but she takes her daughter, who is
also by now a very good student and very apt
in her own way in terms of the sciences, and
together they literally go out into the field use these
particularies to X ray in the field and change medical care.
Because if you think about it, right, soldiers, they would
(40:26):
look at your leg and they would say that looks bad.
We're going to take it off right here, right now.
Now you could X ray a leg and say it
looks savable or it doesn't look savable, and make a
medically informed decision. This really changed triage care and wartime
medical care in a very important way. That's right, and
(40:48):
this is really critical, and it shows how she's desperate
to use scientific knowledge to improve people's lives. She wanted
to help, she wanted to make this happen. And then
again she and her daughter Irene, they were around at
all these X rays all day long, and these were
very powerful X ray devices, and they radiated themselves over
and over and over again, and back in the day
(41:09):
that the first X ray tubes of people used were
much more powerful than anybody needed. These days, the X
rays we use when you go to the dentist are
much much weaker because we understand that it's radiation that
the more exposure leads to a higher rate of cancer.
Back then, they would just blast people with huge amounts
of X rays and Marie and Iree would get it
all day long, right, they kept doing it over and
(41:30):
over again for other people. Yeah, in a way, it's
miraculous that frankly, they didn't die earlier than they did.
I don't know how they survived that long, you know,
without lead shielding and careful preventative care. It's incredible that
they persisted for years and years during this kind of research.
So Marie at this point, she's viewed as fairly heroic.
(41:50):
It's understood that she is unusually successful. Other women look
to her, and in fact, women in the United States
say come here, will raise money for you, will support
your work, and will raise funds. So she does things
even that she doesn't particularly like to do, socialize with
other people because she sees that in fact that they
(42:12):
can help further the work. She is noted and a
hero in her lifetime, which is important and is different
from I mean, many people in the sciences, it's not
understood till after their death how important the work they
did was. We could be speaking actually of music or art,
but that she was really viewed as heroic in her lifetime.
(42:33):
Thankfully for her, she got to enjoy that, appreciate that. Well,
do you think she enjoyed that? Do you think that's
something that mattered to her? That's a that's a very
good point. It seems from you know, reading letters and
so on, that she was hardly wont to bask in it.
She definitely was much more concerned with continuing the work
(42:54):
than having the recognition, and the work was all, but
the ability need to do practical application and the recognition
for her work did seem to matter to her. Probably
having something to do with, you know, long ago a
father who said I want you to do this, I
want you to make it, I want you to practically
(43:15):
apply it. I mean, being a success in that sense
may have had some meaning to her. She certainly didn't
say when the Nobel Prize committee said, don't come or
we don't want to give it to you. Oh, okay,
you know, she wanted the recognition appropriately, so, but you're right,
it wasn't the biggest driver, it wasn't the most important thing.
(43:37):
And I do think that this combination of tendency toward depression,
which probably made her a very empathic person in terms
of being able to read others and be attuned to
and concerned with the suffering of others, for example, the
suffering of soldiers on the field in wartime, and that
combined with this obsessiveness, which it's important to know that
(44:01):
when someone is very depressed, they tend to do something
called rumination, which is really just obsessive thoughts that go
round and round and round that are negative, their negative thoughts.
So instead of calling them just purely obsessive thoughts, we
call them rumination. And her capacity to sit with the
same thought and have it percolate in there and go
(44:23):
around and round provided probably difficulty at difficult times, but
further her work at non difficult times, non depressed times.
And then this aspect of potentially masochism, which commonly runs
in people who suffer with depression. Right, what is depression?
It is negative feeling about oneself turned inward, which is
(44:47):
masochistic all by itself. And she took a lot of
risks and was so denying of herself in so many
ways that one would wonder about that being a prominent
and important part of her character. She used these things, nonetheless,
two problem solved to solve problems. That was always at
the top of the list for her, and that is
(45:09):
I think what made her a part of what made
her so psychologically successful. And then she pulled her daughter
in with her to do work. Can you tell us
a little bit about what she did with her daughter,
because of course they go on to be the first
mother daughter and the only mother daughter Nobel Prize. That's right. Well,
(45:31):
she brought Irene in originally to help with these X
ray machines, and she and Irene went out and did that,
and so of course Irene had to understand the physics
of it and understand what radiation is. But Irene went
off to have her own career later on, and she
won the Nobel Prize just after her mother died. But
she won the Nobel Prize for essentially creating artificial radio activity. Remember,
(45:54):
Marie had spent a lot of her career filtering out
radioactive elements from the pitch blend, but instead Irene developed
this way to create radio active elopments much more cheaply.
She would take aluminum, she would bombard it with helium atoms,
and that would create radioactive phosphorus. And so you didn't
have to go dig this stuff out of the ground
(46:15):
and painstakingly filter out a graham out of a ton
of ore. You could make it much more cheaply in
the laboratory. And also it was just another example of
this awesome power, right that you could smash atoms together
and create a new kind of atom. Really pretty impressive.
So her mother, who labored and labored to basically come
up with radiation or radioactive material, she did this artificially.
(46:38):
This was a way of like an artificial radiation chain
reaction that she created. That's right. And interestingly, Irene missed
out on a couple of other fascinating discoveries at the time,
like she was very close to discovering the neutron, this
particle inside the atom, but was just barely beaten to
it by Chadwick and others. She was looking for her
place in history, and so it was this artificial radiation
(47:01):
that cemented her place in the history of science and
probably a big driver for her was her mother, because
besides cementing a place in history, she probably cemented a
certain relationship and a bond with her mother that could
never be broken, that was really unique, and tied them
together in science, which was just amazing. Unfortunately, of course,
Marie had died before Irene won her Nobel Prize, but
(47:24):
I think for Irene that must have meant a lot
to her to equal her mother, at least in achieving
the Nobel Prize, even if not in achieving too. Who
could ever live up to that standard. Yes, sadly, Marie
died in of basically a plastic anemia, which was likely
a result of this lifelong exposure to radiation over and
(47:47):
over again. Irene too, sadly dies also of another blood
disorder that is not exactly a plastic anemia, but also
is probably a result of lifelong radiation exposure. Yeah, it's sad.
Both of these ladies devoted themselves to science, give us
so much knowledge, give us such a deep understanding of
the way the adam works and radio activity, but sacrificed
(48:10):
their health and their life for it. She was later
actually in the nineteen nineties, recognized again by so she
she was she was Polish. She considers herself certainly a
Polish national, but she spent most of her life in France,
and she was buried next to Pierre, but then placed
(48:32):
in the Pantheon, a unique recognition by the French of
her stature, even so many decades later. So it's really
hard to think of a woman, let alone any person
who really accomplished and was recognized for as much as
Marie Curie ultimately was. That's right. And when they moved
(48:54):
her ashes some theing, like sixty years after she had died,
they moved her ashes into the Antheon, they were still radioactive.
I understand that her letters were not allowed to be
viewed for such a long time also because of the radioactivity,
and that today though they have been made available under
(49:17):
very special and certain circumstances, you must wear gloves of
a certain type. Again, also because there is still a
tiny bit of radiation left. That's right in the lab
where she did all these experiments. Normally, such a place
of historic value would be someplace you'd like to visit,
but nobody is allowed in there because it's still decades later,
(49:38):
way too radioactive to be safe even for short visits.
And you know, she spent decades in there. That's amazing
as a scientist is there thought of how long will
it take before anybody could step in there or be
exposed to any of that. It will be centuries. I mean,
these things last a very, very long time, and you know,
it just tells you a little bit about the culture
(50:00):
of safety. These days in science, we try to be
very careful about not exposing our young researchers to things
that could sterilize them or give them cancer. Even if
they want to be cowboys and charge ahead, there are
just barriers in place. But back then it was very
much up to the individual, you know, how much danger
you wanted to balance with your ambition. So one thing
that's interesting, though she clearly will remain a scientific marvel
(50:24):
to all of us, I think she's also a psychological
marvel because she really did have a lot to overcome,
particularly as a woman scientists at that time. Her determination,
even in the face of and maybe even partially because of,
the psychological issues that she struggled with, they became part
(50:47):
and parcel of what drove her to repeat and repeat
and be driven and ultimately succeed in the sciences in
the way that she did. So she has that interesting
package of both psychological struggle that also strengthened her and
determination to continue on with the fine mind that she had.
(51:09):
And she also had this incredible sort of intellectual courage,
I mean, to come up with the ideas that she invented.
These things seem obvious to us now you know, oh,
the atom is made of smaller bits which can fall
apart in amit radiation. But they were scientifically shocking ideas
at the time they moved the firmament. They changed the
way we saw the nature of reality itself. And that
(51:30):
takes real ambition to believe in yourself to think I
can be the one to crack open this mystery and
reveal something deep about the universe itself. It's it's awesome.
That wraps things up for this episode. Thank you to
my guest Daniel Whiteson. If you want to know more
information about science and Marie Curie, listen to his podcast
(51:54):
Daniel at Work Explain the Universe. And if you want
to know more about the concepts in person Knowledgy, you
can check out my book The Power of Difference, The
Link Between Disorder and Genius For psychological and mental health advice.
You can listen to my new podcast, How can I help?
Follow me on Twitter at doctor Gayl Saltz and until
(52:16):
Next Time. Personology is a production of I Heart Radio.
The executive producers are Doctor Gayl Saltz and Tyler Klang.
The associate producer is Lowell Brulante. For more podcasts from
my heart Radio, visit the I heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you get your podcasts.
Personology is a production of I Heart Radio. Marie Currey
was a Polish French physicist and chemist who discovered the
theory of radioactivity, as well as two new elements, polonium
and radium. She was the first woman to win a
(00:22):
Nobel Prize, the first person and only woman to win twice,
and the only person to win a Nobel Prize in
two different scientific fields. My guest today is Daniel Whitson.
He is a professor of Experimental particle physics at the
University of California, Irvine and a fellow of the American
(00:44):
Physical Society. He conducts research using the Large Hadron Collider
at CERN. He is the co host of Daniel and
Jorge Explain the Universe, a fun filled discussion of the
big mind blowing unanswered questions about the universe. Beginning at
the beginning in eighteen sixty seven. Marie Carey, who was
(01:08):
actually born Mania or Maria, but they called her Mania Swardowska.
I'm probably mangling that, but I believe that's how it's pronounced,
was born in Warsaw, which had been Poland but had
recently been taken over by Russia. Essentially, and this was
(01:29):
really important because in terms of the culture and the
emotional state of her family, her mother and father being
not only Polish but really nationalistically Polish, and that being
very important to them. This was a painful time and
it came with a lot of restrictions for them in
(01:52):
terms of what they could do, and it really influenced
the way they handled the raising of their children. That's right.
They had these very strong values about the importance of
Polishness and Poland as a country, and also about education.
I mean, her parents were both teachers, and they really
wanted young Marie or Mania to understand physics and mathematics
(02:15):
and to have a brain in her From lots of perspectives,
they really seemed sort of like modern, forward thinking people
to educate their children to value education, and that really
was forward thinking because as a girl, many families didn't
expect girls to be educated or do much of anything.
But the difference in this family was first of all,
(02:35):
that her mother had been, as you said, an educator,
was head of a private school for women, specifically, so
a not only an educator herself, but an educator of women.
So that was important to her. And clearly the father
married her, so he was more than accepting of this,
and interestingly, he was a physicist himself. Math and physics
(02:59):
was in his opinion, the most important subject, but more
so than that practical math and physics and there it's
not just theoretical, but what could you do with it.
It needed to have application that would turn out to
be really formative and important. For Maria, I feel a
little bit judged there, you know, because the kind of
(03:21):
physics that I do is particle physics. It's sort of
extreme on the edge of uselessness. So I'm not sure
that I would agree with marie curious father about the
value of applied physics. But I think that all science
is valuable, and most importantly, it's just important to teach
your kids to think critically and think scientifically. Think about
how many incredible geniuses in history have contributed to humanity
(03:42):
because their parents insisted on their education, you know, especially
when they broke with tradition the first person in their
family to get an education. Makes me wonder how many
people out there didn't get an education and could have
changed history. Absolutely, Because of course, even though she had
these parent educators, in some ways, she was an unlikely
(04:02):
suspect in the sense that because of what happened in
terms of Russia moving in, they could barely make ends meet.
So even though they were both educators, the mother had
lost her job, she had to move to a lower school,
a lesser school, and certainly a non paying or a
much less paying situation. And the father also fell on
(04:23):
hard times, was paid less for the kind of educating
that he was doing. And in addition to that, there
was a good deal of trauma that happened in this
family early on that we should talk about that also
would make staying focused on education difficult and being a
student difficult. Everything from witnessing Russian soldiers come in and
(04:48):
really commit atrocities to Polish nationals who were trying to
essentially stick up for themselves. These events that occurred were
disturbing to Maria. She remembers them. She she cited them
in letters and so on. And the economic struggles meant
that there was only so much schooling one could afford, essentially,
(05:09):
and this had the potential to limit what happened with
the children working after the parents doing really everything they could.
And there was one small silver lining there that the
Russians came in and they, for example, they said no
more lab instruction in Polish schools. They didn't want to,
They didn't care too much about the education of the
Polish students, and so Marie's father was forced to bring
(05:31):
home all of his awesome lab equipment that he used
to use in the school, which men of course that
he got to teach his kids how to do physics experiments.
So she indirectly actually benefited from the sort of Russian
oppression of Polish education. So no doubt this made an
early impact on her, just the engagement in being able
to do these kinds of lab experiments and being excited
(05:52):
about the equipment, and developing a passion herself, not just
her father's passion, but her own passion for the science. Unfortunately,
also as a young person, her mother developed tuberculosis and
therefore was really not only sickly, but kept her distance
(06:14):
from Marie because even though it was sort of pre
the well understanding that tb was passed communally, she had
enough of a sense that she tried to sort of
keep a distance, be less touchy. And in fact, Marie
is noted for saying, at some point I never felt
a mother's kiss that specifically the physical affection. Yeah, that
(06:34):
it was really sad, but it was really her mother's
attempt to spare her daughter and her family. And also
there were these absences of the mother where she would
go to the classic sort of sanatorium, which was the
only treatment they had at the time, go away rest
to some sort of spa like treatment. They weren't fun
spats like today his spats, but you know, some sort
of resting treatment in the mountains where the air was
(06:56):
supposedly better, and she would go away for periods of time.
So it Maria had a sense of abandonment essentially, and
take one of her younger sisters there were multiple sisters,
but Josiah went for cures with her mother. She also
was a sickly child. So there was sort of a dearth,
I guess, I say of parental attention in certain ways.
(07:19):
The more present parent was actually the father who was
teaching and you know who ultimately had to move to
a boarding school that he housed in his home because
essentially he lost his job and that was the only
way to make money to bring students to his home
create like an in home boarding school. So Maria has
(07:39):
these memories of you know, sleeping on the floor, sleeping wherever,
uh not having enough food, trying to literally get by
in this very crowded circumstance so that the family could
make ends meet. And I wonder if this is part
of what gives her her passion for science that we
see through her entire life. If she feels like Biken
(08:00):
ducting experiments, by studying the universe, maybe you could gain
some power over it. You could develop some new tool
that could help cure some sickness, or help some people,
or really change the fundamental characteristics of your life. Because
she went through all these struggles as a kid, feeling
powerless over all these large forces that controlled the shape
of her life. Absolutely, I do think psychologically it did
(08:23):
even unconsciously have such an impact because we know, and
we'll talk about this later, that the discovery she makes
she channels practically speaking, practical as her father would say,
it was important into applications that did have potential for
curative or supposedly curative effect, but certainly medical treatment. And
(08:43):
that was clearly consciously or unconsciously important to her. So,
perhaps motivated by what happened with her mother and what
happened with her sister, her mother dies when Marie is
only ten, So you can imagine that that loss would
psychologically be very prmative. But let's talk for a minute
about the fact that she was already very bright, clearly
(09:05):
very bright. It wasn't just that her father was feeding
her this stuff or teaching her this stuff. At age
four she started reading Yeah, wow, exactly today we would
be like wow, what, but certainly with as little education
as there was available until at least later than that.
It's a real While she is known to have said
(09:26):
I didn't mean to do it, she did it in
a setting that was potentially embarrassing to the family members
that she was with who weren't reading. So she caught
onto that and said, I didn't need to do it,
but it was so easy that I couldn't help it.
I'm sorry. And her father saw that and he started
giving her math problems. So at a very early age
(09:49):
she was already doing math of various sorts, which set
her up for school to be really a very thriving student.
And it seems to be a theme in her if
also the things just sort of came easily to her,
you know. She took on difficult problems and solved them,
and then later on in her scientific career, she made,
you know, all sorts of discovery show and two Nobel prizes,
(10:12):
just like a woman of great intellectual heft. It's it's impressive.
I would have loved to have talked to her. You
might have loved to have talked to her, but you
would have had to probably only talked to her about science,
as we will see later, because that was her passion
and that was her interest, and most other things didn't
interest her as much. She did, of course, attend and
(10:34):
graduate high school, but she graduated the age of fifteen,
not surprising, just because she was really so bright and accelerated.
And then her family, her father sends her to live
with the mother's family when she graduates because frankly, there
isn't much going on. They don't have the money to
send her directly to university. So in this interim period
(10:59):
she go is to live with the mother's extended family
to basically have fun, have a little bit of what
life should be like for an adolescent woman at that time.
And the mother's family is more well off, so she
gets to attend dances and have social interactions, and she
(11:20):
goes fishing, and she actually experiences interestingly and it's notable
at this time her first depression because even though she
gets pulled out of it by being in this happy environment,
when she first moves away from her family her father,
I guess I should say in the remaining siblings, she
has her first experience of saying she feels incredibly down.
(11:42):
She talks about her sadness and feeling that it's difficult
to move or have energy, and really describes the classic
symptoms of a first major depression. That's important because teenage
years are typically the first presentation of major depression, and
someone who's going to have were current major depression. And
sadly Marie does have recurrent major depression, but this seems
(12:05):
to have been the first one. And it makes some
sense because she plows through school, she ends up with
a gold medal. She probably is the kind of person
who defined herself somewhat by her academic achievements, by what
she's learned and the meaning of it all. And so
then to have nowhere to go essentially afterwards, because the
opportunities don't exist there for women must have been frustrating.
(12:25):
It's a friction against you know, her identity absolutely, And
she makes a deal with her sister Branya, who wants
to go to medical school, that she will work and
help her sister get through medical school in Paris, which,
by the way, was the choice because it was one
of the only places that would accept women and that
(12:47):
medical school didn't cost money, so Branya could do that
and for her living expenses. Marie helped her by taking
a job essentially as a nanny for an intellectual errorist
aocratic family, which was not an unusual thing to do,
and sort of nanny tudor. And she falls in love
(13:07):
with the son of the family. This is her first love.
The son also falls in love with her, and they
go to the parents and say, we'd like to get married,
and of course the parents say, are you kidding me?
Absolutely not, you are not marrying a lower class woman
with no money. This whole part of her life to
(13:28):
me feels like a Jane Austin novel. You know, this
deal with her sister. First, you get an education than
I do. And she falls in love with the guy,
but the family say no, I mean it's all there's
so much rich drama there. It's amazing. It is like
a Jane Austin hoffl. Absolutely a Polish Russian Jane Austin novel,
but but it really is. And in that setting of
(13:48):
the son saying, oh, you'll disinherit me if I marry her. Okay,
never mind, then she experiences another depression. It's another loss.
It's important to understand and that when someone has had
early life loss like a mother dying at age ten
and a sister dying shortly thereafter, future losses or abandonments,
(14:09):
even if they're not a death, even if their breakup,
can bring back the same kind of trauma, traumatic feelings,
and cause one to experience a depression. So she really
stopped functioning at that point, and it took her a
while to recover. Of course, there was there were no
medications at that time, no particular treatments for depression. But
she did ultimately recover and it did resolve, and her
(14:33):
sister made her way and her partner also, like Zorowski,
the man she fell in love with, I think it
was tragic as well for him. I read these stories
that years later he became a famous mathematician. Years later
he would sit in front of a statue of Murray
Cury and sort of think about what life might have
been like if they had been married. So that's interesting
he became a professor himself. Yeah, he was gifted in
(14:55):
mathematics and he became a, you know, a very well
known professor. So do you know, overshadowed of course by
the giant that is Marie Curry. In any other sort
of time period, he would have been very well known.
But it's hard to measure up to that standard. Wow.
So that's fascinating and I'm sure that contributes. You know,
a person like Marie Curry is going to be attracted
to somebody else who has sort of the same intellectual
(15:16):
interests and intellectual passion and the desire to understand and
take puzzles apart. So it makes perfect sense that the
person she would fall in love with would also be
somebody who wanted to unravel the secrets of the universe,
and she would go on to do that. Again. Clearly,
when she was feeling better and this had resolved and
she had gotten over this, around the age of twenty three,
(15:38):
her sister finished medical school and tells Mania to come
to Paris, that she needs to start her education and
that Rony will help her. This is her element now, right,
She essentially is going on to graduate school or you know,
university and graduate work. Her father advises her, remember, I
(15:59):
want you to do sign aience that's practical. I guess
that's not what your father did, but that's what her
father did, and so that was the mandate, Like you
go on and do this, but do something that's practical.
So she studies at the Saubant in Paris, and she
decides that after her previous experience with men, which took
up her emotional time, energy and caused her to feel depressed,
(16:20):
that she would swear off men. So she was completely
committed to the lab, to the study, and then she
meets Pierre. Well, you know there are men everywhere, right,
especially in science. A hundred years ago, it's dominated by men,
and so it's difficult to do science, to be a
serious academic without being, you know, the only woman or
(16:42):
one of few women around. It's unfortunately something that hasn't
changed enough. It is still a field dominated by male academics.
In fact, she was getting her master's in physics and
math and she was one of three women out of
two thousand students. So when you say male dominated, your
right on that. It was highly unusual. And of course
(17:03):
when there are only three women around in two thousand men. Yes,
you would get a fair amount of mail attention, and
think about the fortitude it took to continue. You know,
back then, it's not like there were only three women
out of two thousand because women weren't interested, you know,
it was not something that was supported. Families were not
encouraging it, the other students probably trying to push them out.
It's difficult for women today to survive the academic climate
(17:26):
because it is sort of biased towards men and populated
mostly by men. But a hundred years ago it must
have been so much more difficult. It must have taken
like a real desire and passion to climb this mountain
and make the achievements that she did in that climate
a hundred years ago. Let's take a quick break here.
We'll be back in a moment. From the evidence we have,
(17:46):
we don't see any writings that really indicate that she
was pained by this, but rather that she was simply determined,
and that in a way she had emotional blinders on
that she she saw which you wanted to do, and
she was really unconcerned about what other people in general
thought of her, save for perhaps her father and her siblings.
(18:10):
Her family did matter to her, but she was otherwise
unconcerned and in that sense chose to live in a dank,
cold sounded almost like a cell, where she would have
no other interests or comforts, and purposely to do nothing
but focus on the math and the physics, to not socialized,
(18:34):
to not be concerned with having friends or concerned with
certainly having a boyfriend. And interestingly, Pierre Curie, who was
a colleague, let's say, was also fairly esthetic. He was
also a man consumed by his work, by the math
and physics. In fact, he's known to have said that
(18:56):
he essentially was uninterested in women and getting involved with
a woman because they could quote, you know, suck the
intellectual energy from you. And that was you know, in
the words family and marriage. It was not what he
was after. He didn't want to be bogged down with
emotional things. So he was also equally focused on his work.
(19:17):
And so it's quite amazing that the two of them
should start to work together. And ultimately it was really
he that changed his mind. It was he that proposed
that perhaps they could be emotionally involved, that perhaps they
could get married. She says, in fact, she really did
not fall in love with Pierre Curie until her honeymoon.
(19:40):
She agreed to get married to him because he had
really convinced her that they would make a great partnership.
It was a scientific couple. They were thinking, think about
the things we could discover together, think about the mysteries
we could unravel, and that's sort of romantic in a
very unusual way. They're supporting each other, encouraging each other,
(20:01):
sort of resonating with each other, but not in the
way that you know most couple to do. Absolutely, and
of course Pierre had as a man, he did have
access to certain things, the lab equipment, things that she wanted,
and he did offer really to include her and to
promote her work and let her partake of the advantages
(20:24):
that he had as a man in the field, and
that allowed her to do the work that she wanted to.
That was very important. It was very important to her,
but it ended up being important to both of them.
Can you describe a little bit the kind of work
that they really embarked on together from a scientific point
of view. Yeah, And before he met Marie, he actually
(20:44):
had an impressive track record of research on his own
and with other collaborators, which he set aside almost entirely
to focus on the questions that Marie wanted to ask.
He's the person who discovered Piazzo electronics, this property of
crystals that if you put electricity or with them, they squeeze,
or if you squeeze or crystal you can generate electricity.
(21:05):
So he had discovered that years earlier and been doing
research on magnetism and crystals. But Pierre and Marie were
forming their scientific collaboration at a very exciting time in physics.
Just a few years earlier, we had discovered the first particle,
the electron, and all sorts of things were being discovered.
X rays had been discovered in and so there was
(21:27):
an exciting moment. It was this feeling that like we
were going to crack open the nature of matter and
finally figure out what everything was made out of. And
remember also at this time people didn't know like what
the atom was and what it was made out of
and what was inside of it. Pierre was kind of
known for designing delicate equipment, right like the electrometer, this
(21:48):
very precise or for the time precise and delicate equipment,
and he brought her in. She was commissioned to weigh
metals so to work with matter, and it was the
joining of these two things. I mean, yes, I guess
he had to diverge from exactly what he had been
working on. But together she continued to weigh metals, but
(22:10):
it became more about the metals, right, and the properties
of the metals that they ultimately began working on together,
that's right. And they used these very precise instruments that
he developed, specifically the electrometer electrometer or something that measures
how much electrical current can pass through something, that essentially
the potential across something. And they were using this essentially
(22:30):
to explore radiation because these X ray had been discovered recently,
so people were aware of the idea that there might
be like invisible particles shooting through space. But then a
year later and Rebeccarell discovered that uranium also gives out
some kind of ray, So we discovered X rays. Now
we discovered these weird uranium rays, and the whole world
(22:53):
was sort of a blaze with interest in X rays,
and not as nearly as many people were studying these
uranium rays. So what Marine and Pierre did, which was
interesting and fascinating, is that they measured the effect of
these uranium rays on the air. They showed that these
uranium rays, whatever this thing was that was coming out
of uranium, was making the air, so we could conduct
(23:14):
electricity just like a really small amount. And so that's
why it was crucial that they used this device that
Pierre invented this electrometer, and so that was the first
discovery that they made together. So in a way, they
really kind of invented what's called courts technology. Right. The
courts became like the big deal around that time. And
(23:36):
wasn't that like used to power general things that we
were interested in, like watches and other machinery essentially that
was important to use. That's right. These Pizzo electrical crystals
are very important even today. We used them in all
sorts of devices. You know, every time you push a
button on your barbecue, for example, that little clicker that
(24:00):
lights the fire, that's po electronics and so these things
are everywhere, and they're used to do very precise location
of very small devices and to generate electricity from motion,
and so yeah, they're they're certainly very important. One thing
that's really notable about Marie's work even at this time
is that she would do an experiment over and over
(24:22):
and over again. She was known to do the same
experiment like forty times. One might call that as a
mental health professional obsessive. On the plus side, certainly she
was persistent, right, and it is important to repeat your
data collection over and over again to make sure that
(24:44):
it's accurate. But she was really obsessive about accuracy and
repeating and repeating something that might drive another person kind
of nuts, like enough, already we did this, however many
we've already done this there any times, we don't need
another ten times. But she really continued and that actually
ended up being very valuable trait in terms of doing
(25:09):
the kind of science that they were doing together. It
certainly did and later on in their life they need
to purify these materials to get pure samples of the
radioactive elements, and that took a lot of work, and
she would just do it and do it and do it.
She was something of a lab rat. So there was
this I don't know what you call it crystals or
what is pitch blend exactly, because you manually collected pitch
(25:30):
blend for these experiments, right. Pitch Blend is a radioactive
uranium rich mineral and ore and it has oxygen and
uraneum in it, and it's something that was extracted during
mining processes, and she could get vast quantities of this stuff,
and she studied it and understood its radioactive processes, that
it generated these currents in the air nearby, and it
(25:53):
didn't seem to matter if it was in a solid
form or a powder form, if it was wet or
if it was dry. And this is what really gave
her this inside that like maybe it was something inside.
There's something inside these atoms that was happening. This is
the beginning of the creation of this idea that atoms
were not like indivisible little blocks, that they were built
(26:15):
out of smaller things so that they could, you know,
therefore change, they could like fall apart, they could shoot
out little pieces of themselves. And so pitch blend has
uranium in it and it decays radioactively, and so it
shoots out these little bits and has inside of it
what we now know as radium. So this everybody got
very excited about radium. If you look back at advertisements,
(26:38):
even for for all kinds of products, there was sort
of this wow radium, you know, almost advertising radium in
weird non sequiturs, but as part of something that you
could somehow get or own or would make life better.
Certainly there was a lot of excitement about it, clearly
following as you mentioned earlier, that Marie and Pierre Enri
(27:00):
Bocharrell won the Nobel Prize. This Nobel Prize, I think
it's really important. First of all, they didn't want to
give the Nobel Prize to Marie. They really just wanted
to give the Nobel Prize to Pierre and Enri Bascharrell.
And it was Pierre that said, I will not accept
this prize unless my wife also gets this prize. Because
she did the lion's share of the work. That's astonishing.
(27:24):
Today even I would say that would be pretty astonishing.
But just goes to show the old adage that it
often is who you marry and how supportive they are
of your career that is a big determinant of your successes.
But in this case, he more than supported her, he
(27:44):
pointed out, and it was true that actually she in
some ways did more of the work than he did
and was more deserving of the prize. But at that
time it was unheard of for a woman to win.
I mean, she was the first woman to win, as
we'll explain later, or she goes on to be not
only the first woman to win Nobel Prize, but the
first woman to win two Nobel Prizes and the only
(28:08):
person male or female to win two Nobel Prizes in
two different science areas. So this first prize was in physics,
and she was able to go and was able to
receive her prize, but had to sit in the front
of the audience and not be on stage to receive
(28:29):
her prize. Again, a lot of effort to push back
and deny her the prize, but this ensured her a
place really scientifically at least with her university and in
her ability to continue on and do the work and
that she did. And that's something that's that's happening already
here which I think is fascinating, is that both Pierre
(28:50):
and Marie are having health issues. Like they're doing all
this work in the lab, they're studying radiation, and they're
so smart and there's so intelligent, but they're not making
a connect action between this radiation that they're working with
and their own health. And when doing this research, Marie
lost like twenty pounds while doing this research, and both
of them had like permanent damage in their fingertips because
(29:12):
they were touching radioactive substances, and throughout their whole lives
they never really made this connection. Well, you know, it's interesting.
I want to argue that at least consciously, they don't
record making this connection. But I would tell you that
perhaps unconsciously, given the fact that they did things like
keep a little teeny bit of radium and a test
(29:33):
tube in their pocket next to their skin and see
an open sore form, there was such hard evidence that
it would be impossible to not register it on any level.
And I would argue that it fits with her lifelong
commitment to living in this totally abstemious way with no
(29:57):
comforts of any sort. I guess I make in the
argument that in addition to having recurrent depression, Marie Carey
was pretty masochistic. She was a massochistic woman. She really
indulged in tremendous suffering, and of course she felt that
her suffering was for her work, and it was for
her work, but it was acceptable to the point of
(30:19):
one must wonder if she was not drawn to this
type of behavior. And as you point out, importantly, not
only did they suffer from these terrible effects of radium.
But along the way they had two daughters. Marie really
did not love being a mother. She was really much
more passionate about the science. She loved her daughters, She
(30:39):
clearly loved her daughters, but she didn't love mothering. So
she had this constant setup of not mothering or letting
them do a lot of their own growing up and
figuring it out and not being as present and feeling
guilty about it, constantly guilty and recording her guilt, and
that being a conflict for her. But in that since
(31:00):
also she's a very modern woman, right, she had kids, yes,
but then she went back to the lab. And that's
what a lot of women scientists do these days. They
have both. And so she's six years ahead of her
time in the sense of thinking that she can have
this role as a woman, being a mother but also
be a scientist, that she can do both things. It's
(31:21):
really incredible. It is extraordinary and highly unusual. Her oldest daughter, Irene,
becomes a scientist as well ultimately, and in fact, Irene
often says that she was drawn to science because it
was a way of bonding with her mother, and her
mother would be interested in her and talked to her
about science, and that is the path she chose. The
younger daughter, l ultimately became a journalist, was an incredible pianist,
(31:45):
but had a harder time with the distance that she felt.
Both girls report loving their mother and their mother loving them,
but their mother was basically a workaholic, very very dedicated
to her science. So yes, you point out they become sicker,
they're cold, they're hungry, they're tired, sleep isn't important. They
(32:05):
don't take care of themselves, all in the name of science.
And I also think, in juxtaposition to her children's sort
of interesting to think about her naming and discovery of
radium and polonium, that she named polonium after Poland. Her
still her nationalistic feelings about Poland, but like these became
her children, radium and polonium were her kids as opposed
(32:29):
to her kids. That is the kind of dedication that
she felt. You think if you went over to dinner
at Marie Cury's house, should introduce you to her elements
before she introduced you to her children. I think that
is likely, And I think that if she happened to
serve you up something that gave you radiation poisoning, you know, bummer.
But that was also a real possibility because, as she
pointed out consciously, she wasn't aware of that, but that
(32:51):
was her pride and enjoying the thing that she would
want to show you. Sadly, Pierre is killed at the
age of forty nine while they are working. He is
out walking, he falls, a wagon apparently rolls over him
and crushes him, and this throws her into yet another
terrible depression because by now she deeply loves Pierre and
(33:14):
he is her partner and everything. And she cites interestingly
that her work, in her opinion, is what pulls her
out of depression this time, that she is so depressed,
but by working she can slowly, bit by bit, find
her way out of feeling so depressed. She's so depressed
that she really doesn't care for the kids at all.
(33:34):
At this point, Pierre's father takes the children. He understands
her that she has to be working. It's like work
as therapy. Right. If you've ever had a time in
your life when you had a personal tragedy, sometimes just
throwing yourself into a project or something totally different can
help distract you from it and build up those mental rhythms,
and I've never had a tragedy the skill that Marie
(33:56):
Curi has suffered, but I certainly understand how that can
be a salve in those difficult moments, a salve and
for her because it was such a passion it probably
even in terms of neurochemicals and the dopamine reward system
in the brain, when you're involved in something that you
are excited about and passionate about, would give you basically
(34:17):
a boost in terms of your neurotransmitter. So it really
biologically may have helped pull her out of the depression
because at this point, she's really onto radium as a
potential cure, having potential practical uses, and even though very
upsetting things are happening along the way, like she's denied
(34:38):
entry to the Academy of Sciences as a Nobel Prize
winner because she's a woman. Basically Einstein has, even though
he had great respect for her work, called her cold
as a heron she's not exactly getting warm receptions from
the scientific community. But what the pursuit of radium as
(35:03):
a cure and the work around these substances really galvanizes
her and she keeps moving forward and this again, it's
fascinating because she's aware of radium's medical consequences. She creates
these tubes of radium, she brings them to doctors. Doctors
use them to destroy damage tissue, but she must therefore
(35:23):
be aware of the fact that radium could also be
damaging her tissue. So I think it's fascinating because she
must have had this cognitive distance in her mind. Clearly,
a woman of grading intellect has all the pieces in
place in her head. I think you're probably right. She
doesn't want to see the consequences, or she doesn't want
to say to herself what it would mean, because it
would mean that she couldn't be doing this research anymore.
(35:44):
It certainly was not safe and it definitely sped her
death absolutely. What about her second Nobel Prize, She wins
it in chemistry, they awarded the prize, and then because
at this point it's been a while since Pierre's and
she has taken up romantically with one of Pierre's students,
(36:06):
Paul Langevin, also a researcher, also with that intellect that
would draw her in. She has really what describes kind
of a fiery affair with him, but unfortunately he's married.
This is not a tremendous consequence to her. His marriage
apparently is not a healthy marriage according to him. But
(36:28):
of course it's not he that is punished. It is
always in those days the woman who has seen as
the home wrecker. And so when this comes out, because
Paul Langavin's wife finds out and publicly announces what has happened,
in an effort to in fact destroy them both, the
(36:49):
Nobel Committee, even though they have awarded her the medal,
tries to say, don't come. We don't want you to
come and collect this. It looks bad for us. This
is so absurd. I mean, compare for example, to Einstein,
who's done so much worth. The mistakes he made in
his personal life are just horrendous. But you know, it's
hardly even known. So to even have this like quote
(37:12):
unquote scandal attached to her name and her scientific legacy
feels unfair, quite unfair. Absolutely, It's amazing to me that
even with this recurrent attempt to deny her, she will
not be stopped. This woman's resilience, her grit and determination
is at least as admirable to me as her intellect,
(37:35):
which is, you know, bar none. Let's take a quick
break here. We'll be back in a moment. Can you
describe a little bit the second Nobel Prize what it
was essentially awarded for. So the nineteen eleven Nobel Prize
that she wins in chemistry, she wins is for producing
radium and radium and lots of promising applications in medicine
(37:55):
and in all sorts of stuff. And radium was really
difficult to come by this pitch blend, and uranium in
the pitch blend would radioactively decay to radium, but there
were really tiny, tiny quantities, and so assembling this stuff,
proving that radium was its own thing and not just
like some weird version of other things we already knew
(38:16):
in a chemical combination was really what she won the
Nobel Prize for. And you have to remember back then
people thought of elements as like each thing was its own.
Gold was gold and lead was lead, and even though
people have been trying for hundreds of years, you couldn't
turn lead into gold. And so what radio activity did
was really break that. It showed that one thing really
could turn into another. It was the advent of honest
(38:39):
modern day alchemy, which is now like a real science.
We do this all the time in particle physics, and
so uranium would turn into radium or into thorium, orn't
one of these other elements, And so this was a
big deal. And this is back in the day when
even just discovering a new element that was enough to
cement your place in history, because it was a new
(38:59):
kind of England nobody had ever seen before. And so
that's what she won the nineteen eleven Prize and Chemistry
for producing radium, which was chemically very difficult to extract
from the pitch blend. So and she also made the
point at that juncture that hey, one's personal life should
have nothing to do with one's work life and work recognition,
(39:21):
something that actually wasn't a problem for men any way,
generally speaking, but obviously it was a problem for women,
a unique statement for that time, believe it or not.
Shortly after this time that the World War broke out
and she decides to use the radium which she has
now basically figured out how to create small stations to
(39:45):
do X rays and to therefore be able to do
X rays in the field. This is actually departure from
the work that she had been doing right it's something different,
another creation, another creative and practical use of science. She
designs these cards, they're called petitue curies. At the end
(40:05):
of the day, but she takes her daughter, who is
also by now a very good student and very apt
in her own way in terms of the sciences, and
together they literally go out into the field use these
particularies to X ray in the field and change medical care.
Because if you think about it, right, soldiers, they would
(40:26):
look at your leg and they would say that looks bad.
We're going to take it off right here, right now.
Now you could X ray a leg and say it
looks savable or it doesn't look savable, and make a
medically informed decision. This really changed triage care and wartime
medical care in a very important way. That's right, and
(40:48):
this is really critical, and it shows how she's desperate
to use scientific knowledge to improve people's lives. She wanted
to help, she wanted to make this happen. And then
again she and her daughter Irene, they were around at
all these X rays all day long, and these were
very powerful X ray devices, and they radiated themselves over
and over and over again, and back in the day
(41:09):
that the first X ray tubes of people used were
much more powerful than anybody needed. These days, the X
rays we use when you go to the dentist are
much much weaker because we understand that it's radiation that
the more exposure leads to a higher rate of cancer.
Back then, they would just blast people with huge amounts
of X rays and Marie and Iree would get it
all day long, right, they kept doing it over and
(41:30):
over again for other people. Yeah, in a way, it's
miraculous that frankly, they didn't die earlier than they did.
I don't know how they survived that long, you know,
without lead shielding and careful preventative care. It's incredible that
they persisted for years and years during this kind of research.
So Marie at this point, she's viewed as fairly heroic.
(41:50):
It's understood that she is unusually successful. Other women look
to her, and in fact, women in the United States
say come here, will raise money for you, will support
your work, and will raise funds. So she does things
even that she doesn't particularly like to do, socialize with
other people because she sees that in fact that they
(42:12):
can help further the work. She is noted and a
hero in her lifetime, which is important and is different
from I mean, many people in the sciences, it's not
understood till after their death how important the work they
did was. We could be speaking actually of music or art,
but that she was really viewed as heroic in her lifetime.
(42:33):
Thankfully for her, she got to enjoy that, appreciate that. Well,
do you think she enjoyed that? Do you think that's
something that mattered to her? That's a that's a very
good point. It seems from you know, reading letters and
so on, that she was hardly wont to bask in it.
She definitely was much more concerned with continuing the work
(42:54):
than having the recognition, and the work was all, but
the ability need to do practical application and the recognition
for her work did seem to matter to her. Probably
having something to do with, you know, long ago a
father who said I want you to do this, I
want you to make it, I want you to practically
(43:15):
apply it. I mean, being a success in that sense
may have had some meaning to her. She certainly didn't
say when the Nobel Prize committee said, don't come or
we don't want to give it to you. Oh, okay,
you know, she wanted the recognition appropriately, so, but you're right,
it wasn't the biggest driver, it wasn't the most important thing.
(43:37):
And I do think that this combination of tendency toward depression,
which probably made her a very empathic person in terms
of being able to read others and be attuned to
and concerned with the suffering of others, for example, the
suffering of soldiers on the field in wartime, and that
combined with this obsessiveness, which it's important to know that
(44:01):
when someone is very depressed, they tend to do something
called rumination, which is really just obsessive thoughts that go
round and round and round that are negative, their negative thoughts.
So instead of calling them just purely obsessive thoughts, we
call them rumination. And her capacity to sit with the
same thought and have it percolate in there and go
(44:23):
around and round provided probably difficulty at difficult times, but
further her work at non difficult times, non depressed times.
And then this aspect of potentially masochism, which commonly runs
in people who suffer with depression. Right, what is depression?
It is negative feeling about oneself turned inward, which is
(44:47):
masochistic all by itself. And she took a lot of
risks and was so denying of herself in so many
ways that one would wonder about that being a prominent
and important part of her character. She used these things, nonetheless,
two problem solved to solve problems. That was always at
the top of the list for her, and that is
(45:09):
I think what made her a part of what made
her so psychologically successful. And then she pulled her daughter
in with her to do work. Can you tell us
a little bit about what she did with her daughter,
because of course they go on to be the first
mother daughter and the only mother daughter Nobel Prize. That's right. Well,
(45:31):
she brought Irene in originally to help with these X
ray machines, and she and Irene went out and did that,
and so of course Irene had to understand the physics
of it and understand what radiation is. But Irene went
off to have her own career later on, and she
won the Nobel Prize just after her mother died. But
she won the Nobel Prize for essentially creating artificial radio activity. Remember,
(45:54):
Marie had spent a lot of her career filtering out
radioactive elements from the pitch blend, but instead Irene developed
this way to create radio active elopments much more cheaply.
She would take aluminum, she would bombard it with helium atoms,
and that would create radioactive phosphorus. And so you didn't
have to go dig this stuff out of the ground
(46:15):
and painstakingly filter out a graham out of a ton
of ore. You could make it much more cheaply in
the laboratory. And also it was just another example of
this awesome power, right that you could smash atoms together
and create a new kind of atom. Really pretty impressive.
So her mother, who labored and labored to basically come
up with radiation or radioactive material, she did this artificially.
(46:38):
This was a way of like an artificial radiation chain
reaction that she created. That's right. And interestingly, Irene missed
out on a couple of other fascinating discoveries at the time,
like she was very close to discovering the neutron, this
particle inside the atom, but was just barely beaten to
it by Chadwick and others. She was looking for her
place in history, and so it was this artificial radiation
(47:01):
that cemented her place in the history of science and
probably a big driver for her was her mother, because
besides cementing a place in history, she probably cemented a
certain relationship and a bond with her mother that could
never be broken, that was really unique, and tied them
together in science, which was just amazing. Unfortunately, of course,
Marie had died before Irene won her Nobel Prize, but
(47:24):
I think for Irene that must have meant a lot
to her to equal her mother, at least in achieving
the Nobel Prize, even if not in achieving too. Who
could ever live up to that standard. Yes, sadly, Marie
died in of basically a plastic anemia, which was likely
a result of this lifelong exposure to radiation over and
(47:47):
over again. Irene too, sadly dies also of another blood
disorder that is not exactly a plastic anemia, but also
is probably a result of lifelong radiation exposure. Yeah, it's sad.
Both of these ladies devoted themselves to science, give us
so much knowledge, give us such a deep understanding of
the way the adam works and radio activity, but sacrificed
(48:10):
their health and their life for it. She was later
actually in the nineteen nineties, recognized again by so she
she was she was Polish. She considers herself certainly a
Polish national, but she spent most of her life in France,
and she was buried next to Pierre, but then placed
(48:32):
in the Pantheon, a unique recognition by the French of
her stature, even so many decades later. So it's really
hard to think of a woman, let alone any person
who really accomplished and was recognized for as much as
Marie Curie ultimately was. That's right. And when they moved
(48:54):
her ashes some theing, like sixty years after she had died,
they moved her ashes into the Antheon, they were still radioactive.
I understand that her letters were not allowed to be
viewed for such a long time also because of the radioactivity,
and that today though they have been made available under
(49:17):
very special and certain circumstances, you must wear gloves of
a certain type. Again, also because there is still a
tiny bit of radiation left. That's right in the lab
where she did all these experiments. Normally, such a place
of historic value would be someplace you'd like to visit,
but nobody is allowed in there because it's still decades later,
(49:38):
way too radioactive to be safe even for short visits.
And you know, she spent decades in there. That's amazing
as a scientist is there thought of how long will
it take before anybody could step in there or be
exposed to any of that. It will be centuries. I mean,
these things last a very, very long time, and you know,
it just tells you a little bit about the culture
(50:00):
of safety. These days in science, we try to be
very careful about not exposing our young researchers to things
that could sterilize them or give them cancer. Even if
they want to be cowboys and charge ahead, there are
just barriers in place. But back then it was very
much up to the individual, you know, how much danger
you wanted to balance with your ambition. So one thing
that's interesting, though she clearly will remain a scientific marvel
(50:24):
to all of us, I think she's also a psychological
marvel because she really did have a lot to overcome,
particularly as a woman scientists at that time. Her determination,
even in the face of and maybe even partially because of,
the psychological issues that she struggled with, they became part
(50:47):
and parcel of what drove her to repeat and repeat
and be driven and ultimately succeed in the sciences in
the way that she did. So she has that interesting
package of both psychological struggle that also strengthened her and
determination to continue on with the fine mind that she had.
(51:09):
And she also had this incredible sort of intellectual courage,
I mean, to come up with the ideas that she invented.
These things seem obvious to us now you know, oh,
the atom is made of smaller bits which can fall
apart in amit radiation. But they were scientifically shocking ideas
at the time they moved the firmament. They changed the
way we saw the nature of reality itself. And that
(51:30):
takes real ambition to believe in yourself to think I
can be the one to crack open this mystery and
reveal something deep about the universe itself. It's it's awesome.
That wraps things up for this episode. Thank you to
my guest Daniel Whiteson. If you want to know more
information about science and Marie Curie, listen to his podcast
(51:54):
Daniel at Work Explain the Universe. And if you want
to know more about the concepts in person Knowledgy, you
can check out my book The Power of Difference, The
Link Between Disorder and Genius For psychological and mental health advice.
You can listen to my new podcast, How can I help?
Follow me on Twitter at doctor Gayl Saltz and until
(52:16):
Next Time. Personology is a production of I Heart Radio.
The executive producers are Doctor Gayl Saltz and Tyler Klang.
The associate producer is Lowell Brulante. For more podcasts from
my heart Radio, visit the I heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you get your podcasts.
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