Marie Curie: Stop Romanticizing the Struggle

Hello and welcome to another issue of Abandoned Curiosities. This past week, I read Madam Curie, a biography of Marie Curie written by her daughter Eve.

Marie was a Polish-born French physicist and chemist — and twice a Nobel Prize winner — who genuinely believed that “In science, one must be interested in things, not in persons.” And so it’s also with a little dilemma that I devote this issue to her.

Marie and her husband, Pierre Curie, are most remembered for their pioneering research on radioactivity and its subsequent usage in the treatment of cancer. But, today, I want to talk to you about the precarious — and often heartbreaking — conditions under which these discoveries were made.

“We had no money, no laboratory, and no help in the conduct of this important and difficult task,” Marie would write later.

“It was like creating something out of nothing.”

In their many years of work, the couple could not find a laboratory, or even a proper room, to carry out their research. And had to settle with a shack — “an abandoned shed, with a skylight roof in such bad condition that it admitted the rain.”

Eve further describes the situation: “Torn between their own work and their jobs, they forgot to eat and sleep… In four years of work in the shed, Marie lost seven kilograms.” In fact, Marie’s eventual death due to leukemia is believed to have been brought on by her exposure to the high levels of radiation involved in her studies.

In Eve’s words, “Radioactivity grew and developed, exhausting little by little the pair of physicists who had given it life.”

While the couple’s devotion is a testament to their art, but Marie would have rather not had her patience tested: “It is true that the discovery of radium was made in precarious conditions: the shed which sheltered it seems clouded in the charms of legend. But this romantic element was not an advantage: it wore out our strength and delayed our accomplishment. With better means, the first five years of our work might have been reduced to two, and their tension lessened.”

It further breaks your heart if you consider that the Curies could have patented their discoveries and made more money than they could’ve handled. As Eve points out in her book, “Soon after their discovery of radium, Pierre and Marie Curie made a decision to which they did not attach special importance, but which was to have a great influence over the rest of their lives.” It was after all a question concerning the patent, to which Marie had casually replied, “If our discovery has a commercial future, that is an accident by which we must not profit. And radium is going to be of use in treating disease… It seems to me impossible to take advantage of that.”

And it seems to me impossible to not admire Marie.

Reflecting on the decision years later, Marie writes, “Humanity certainly needs practical men, who get the most out of their work, and, without forgetting the general good, safeguard their own interests. But humanity also needs dreamers, for whom the disinterested development of an enterprise is so captivating that it becomes impossible for them to devote their care to their own material profit.”

In the end, I’m glad science has its dreamers. What do you think?

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