Dava Sobel is an award-winning science writer. Her previous works include Longitude and Galileo’s Daughter, which were both national and international best-sellers, and, more recently, The Glass Universe. She has worked as a science reporter for the New York Times and as a columnist for monthly magazines, including Harvard Magazine and Scientific American.
What’s the big idea?
Almost a century after her life of excellence in science, Marie Curie remains a role model for women, scientists, and people who refuse to give up. To this day, her path of discovery lights the way for career-building across industries.
Below, Dava shares five key insights from her new book, The Elements of Marie Curie: How the Glow of Radium Lit a Path for Women in Science. Listen to the audio version—read by Dava herself—in the Next Big Idea App.
1. Women are drawn to science for the same reasons men are: for the challenge and joy of figuring out how nature works.
Madame Curie may be the most famous woman in the history of science, but she was never the only one. The lesser-known facts of her life reveal a global web of women biologists, chemists, and physicists, more than forty of whom came to work at Mme. Curie’s laboratory in Paris. It was her laboratory from the time of her husband’s early death in an accident in 1906 until her own death in 1934. Over those nearly three decades, she transformed the Curie lab from a few scattered rooms at the University of Paris to a free-standing, world-famous research institute that accommodated scores of staff scientists, lab technicians, student interns, and visiting scholars from as far away as India and China.
Mme. Curie did not intentionally seek out women as part of a feminist agenda. It was more a case of not turning them away. They came from within France and abroad, as she had done when she left her native Warsaw, where the reigning Russian authorities barred girls from attending university. Several of Mme. Curie’s protegees returned to their countries of origin to become the first tenured female professors in the Netherlands, Hungary, Portugal, and elsewhere—as the new experts in radioactivity.
Marie Curie’s faith in women’s ability to learn science was perhaps most evident during the First World War. As soon as the fighting began, she outfitted a mobile X-ray unit and drove it as close to the front lines as military authorities would allow to aid wounded soldiers where they fell. The need was so great that she recruited 150 French women willing to do that same vital work and trained them as X-ray technicians. These were not scientists but ordinary citizens with only a basic education who successfully completed Mme. Curie’s six-week crash course in electricity, X-ray theory and function, and human anatomy.
2. Women’s science is just like men’s science.
There is a widespread tendency to denigrate the scientific research done by women as trivial and repetitive— “scut work” that ranks below the sort of research men perform. In fact, any scientific endeavor entails the repetition of experiments and confirmation procedures that look incredibly boring to non-scientists. Katalin Karikò, the 2023 Nobel Prize winner in Medicine, begins her book Breaking Through by saying, “A woman sits down at a lab bench….She’ll sit for hours without getting up. She may just sit for forty years.”
In the case of married women, joint work with a husband tends to be credited entirely to him. Even though Pierre Curie took every opportunity to point out what Marie had done alone rather than what they had achieved together, he could not quash the belief that she served merely as his assistant.
“Women scientists often find their names excluded from research reports and prize citations.”
Marie’s physicist friend Hertha Ayrton intentionally pursued projects that bore no relation to the physics studies of her husband and, in this way, made her own reputation. Once, when Hertha saw a newspaper report repeating the mistaken idea that the Curies’ collaboration was entirely of Pierre’s doing, she wrote to the editor: “Errors are notoriously hard to kill,” she said, “but an error that ascribes to a man what was actually the work of a woman has more lives than a cat.”
Women scientists often find their names excluded from research reports and prize citations. Lise Meitner, who made the breakthrough leap in recognizing the phenomenon of nuclear fission, stood by as the 1944 Nobel Prize in Chemistry went to her colleague Otto Hahn. Scientists and historians are still shaking their heads over Meitner’s omission.
Marie Curie, on the other hand, was the first woman to receive a Nobel Prize in any category and remains the only person ever to win in both Physics and Chemistry. She and Pierre shared the 1903 Nobel Prize in Physics with Henri Becquerel for their several discoveries and insights into radioactivity (a term that she coined). In 1911, Marie alone received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for the discovery and characterization of two radioactive elements—polonium, named for her homeland, and radium. Just as the prize was announced, however, newspapers broke the story of a “romance in the laboratory” between the widowed Marie and physicist Paul Langevin, a married man with four children. Press reports portraying Marie as a foreigner and a homewrecker caused the Nobel Committee to suggest that she absent herself from the prize ceremony. Instead, she reminded the committee that libelous attacks on her private life had no bearing on the merit of her scientific work, and she showed up in Stockholm.
3. Marie Curie often found herself the only woman in the room.
Over the 20-year period that saw the birth of atomic physics and quantum mechanics, an elite group of physicists met approximately every three years to discuss new developments. At the first such gathering, in 1911, Marie met Albert Einstein, Max Planck, and Ernest Rutherford, among more than twenty preeminent contemporaries. At subsequent meetings, as the group expanded, she conferred with several fellow Nobel Prize winners, including Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg. Not until 1933 did Marie encounter another woman at these invitation-only councils. In fact, there were two other women that year: Lise Meitner and Marie’s own daughter Irène.
4. Women scientists need help combining their careers with motherhood.
Barely a month after Irène’s birth, in 1897, Pierre’s mother died of breast cancer, a loss which led Pierre’s father to move in with the couple and help care for his infant granddaughter while Marie was at work. This was the Curies’ living arrangement when Marie undertook research for her doctoral degree, which led to the discovery of radium.
In the United States, according to a 2019 study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, more than 40 percent of all female scientists leave their full-time positions after the arrival of their first child.
Marie gave birth to a second daughter, Ève, in 1904, and returned to the laboratory, as well as to teaching physics a few days a week at an academy for female teachers. Aside from her father-in-law and the hired help she could now afford, she employed her pet pupil Eugénie Feytis as a frequent babysitter. Eugénie later undertook her own doctoral research in physics and eventually took over the teaching academy.
“More than 40 percent of all female scientists leave their full-time positions after the arrival of their first child.”
In 1908, Marie created a small cooperative school to meet the academic needs of the adolescent Irène. It was staffed by a few of her fellow faculty members at the Sorbonne and attended by their children. The school lasted only two years—long enough to benefit its dozen students. Irène, who followed her mother into the lab and expanded the study of radioactivity, became, in 1935, the second woman to win the Nobel Prize in Chemistry.
5. Mme. Curie continues to “speak” and inspire beyond her death.
I am constantly surprised by the number and variety of people who cite Marie Curie as an inspirational force in their lives. Angela Merkel, the first (and only) female chancellor of Germany, studied physics at university after Mme. Curie’s story awakened her interest in the subject. Fabiola Gianotti, the current (and first) woman Director-General of the particle physics research hub known as CERN in Switzerland, had to choose between becoming a scientist and pursuing an artist’s life as a musician. Reading a biography of Mme. Curie clinched her decision.
A study reported in early 2024 in the Journal of Child Psychology confirmed that a role model need not be physically present in a young girl’s life to inspire her. Indeed, the same study cited Marie Curie as a figure who still acts as a role model for many children. But her appeal and value as an inspirational figure is hardly limited to youngsters, or to girls, or, for that matter, to “nerds.” Actor Alan Alda, who wrote a play about Mme. Curie, called “Radiance,” cites her as his hero. “She had things stacked against her in a half a dozen ways,” Alda said in an interview, “and she never gave up. You can look to Marie as a model for not giving up.”
To listen to the audio version read by author Dava Sobel, download the Next Big Idea App today:
