Doomed to Fail - Ep 19 - Part 1: Discovering the Universe - Marie & Pierre Curie

Episode Date: April 8, 2024

Let's revisit the Curies! Marie and Pierre discovered radium and how it can kill cells. It changed the entire world of science and led to immeasurable disasters and unimagined cures. We discuss their humanity, their work, and their deaths. Post this first release, Taylor met someone who wrote their Ph.D. thesis on Radium, and they were very whelmed that Taylor knew anything about Radium because usually that's a deal breaker on a conversation. It was fun.  Join our Founders Club on Patreon to get ad-free episodes for life! patreon.com/DoomedtoFailPodWe would love to hear from you! Please follow along! Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/doomedtofailpod/  Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/doomedtofailpod  Youtube:  https://www.youtube.com/@doomedtofailpod TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@doomed.to.fail.pod Email: [e-mail] 

Hello, Taylor from Dune to Fail. We are on spring break. Well, I am. I'm in Japan. But Forrest is taking a break. And I am going to re-release four episodes for you this week, starting with the one on Marie and Pierre Curie. So I hope you enjoy this story. And I also know that I kind of mess up what Radium does for cancer.

But I talk about it later, how I fix it. So whatever, it's fine. I know already. I got your emails. Yeah, I hope you enjoy. If you have any questions or ideas for us. Give us a shout at Doomedepilpod at gmail.com. Thanks.

In a matter of the people of the state of California versus Horanthall James Simpson, case number B.A.019. And so, my fellow Americans, ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country. What's the coloring book? Is it the Dora they're for?

Oh, no, it's like one of these really hard ones. It sounds like the only kids show, you know? Yes. no it's just like what's probably is like really hard to color ones you know you know like a lot of detail that's great that's awesome oh she did a great job on that one yeah i mean she's eight she can color i don't know sequentially how these things work yeah i think i asked you in palm springs if she was like four you asked me if my husband was like two and i was like he's six like what are you talking about he's he's playing baseball he can read

you're so funny he has a driver's license what are you talking about he's in college so sorry he's very smart um okay so next week yes ireland uh i'll edit on the pod i'll edit on the plane so you'll probably get it a little bit later than usual that's fine but yeah the whole family's coming over the whole family's coming over they're going to like send me off like i'm jack in titanic oh my god it's so funny are you they're going to like drape you in an irish flag and like you over there Oh, it's Coordination Day, too. Did you watch, did you see that this morning? Coordination.

What does that mean? King Charles was. Oh, my God, who gives a shit? I mean, today, but I mean, but. You lost me. No, no, no. But my point is that the people in Ireland are going to be riled up because they hate, they hate them.

Okay, so do you know that Ireland is actually two countries? Yes. Okay, so does everybody know that and I just learned it like this week? Yes. Cool. Cool. That's awesome. I'm glad.

Well, congratulations on learning that. Thanks. Yeah, no. Yes, it's Ireland and Northern Ireland. There's been a lot of tension. A lot of people died. Yeah, you know what? I made, I might have made some IRA jokes that are not going to be well received.

No, people are still mad about that. It was awful. They're not ready for my sense of humor then. No, no, I would leave that at the door when you enter Ireland. Yeah, I'm definitely, definitely, yeah. But you can say, you can be like, who cares about? King Charles. People would like that. Unless I'm a Northern

Ireland. You're not going to be Northern Ireland. So I wanted to go to Belfast and then Dunn was like why? Like why would you want to go? Because apparently nothing there, but I really just want to go to see where the Titanic was launched from, which I thought would be a really fun bit of history.

That is cool. But nobody wants to go, so I'm not going now. Do you remember in Ghostbusters 2 when the Titanic arrives? No. there's like ghost busters too when like the whole city is like full of ghosts and then they go Cheech and Chong are at the they're the guys at the pier and they call the police because the Titanic just arrived and like it's like it like it's like has a big hole in it and all these ghosts come out of it it's very fun oh I should be watched that um do you hey do I have like dementia you think because

I don't remember anything no I mean I don't know people some people just don't remember anything like you remember everything you remember every detail of every movie I just have a very weird good memory I'm like, I can't tell you stuff about like math but like I know that I remember Chechen Chong's and the Tatan just arrived I don't know

Yeah, something's just Can I remember on one podcast On one episode you asked me Do you remember the real world Seattle? It's like what are you talking about? That was a big It was a cultural moment And I don't know if you watched the real world

I haven't watched a real world in 25 years But I did watch that one Fair enough, fair enough. Do you have your on-air sign on? Oh, shoot, no. I'm gonna go put it out. I promise Miles I would. Hold on one second. I nailed it in my door.

Aren't you what I asked? Yeah. This is the part where we go fully silent. You can't see this, listeners, but Taylor is doing stuff. And now she's back. Oh, fun. I bet my voice sounded like Ira Glass just there. I bet it did.

It was it very calm. Yes. I'll take a picture. I promise Miles I put it on my doors open though because it's just me and the boy at home just in case he needs me cool okay so who's going first today I think me thank you okay it doesn't really matter but I think me cool so we'll go ahead and kick things off although we've kind of been talking for a while now and it's been recording um hi everyone welcome to doom to fail I'm Farr's joined here by Taylor Pinry Pineri oh I already fucked oh my god Pinero Hi, everyone. Welcome to doom to fail. I'm joined here by Taylor. And today we're going to bring you two more stories, one historical, one true crime, of relationships that we're doomed to fail. How are you doing, Taylor? Taylor. I'm good. I'm good. I'm ready. You ready to do this thing? Yeah. Ready to do this thing? Let's do this thing. All right. You tell me what you're drinking. Budweiser. Budweiser. It's very straightforward, very simple. My story. takes place in Missouri

and St. Louis, Missouri is the home of Budweiser. And so I, and also my story is very blue-collar and involves very blue-collar people. And I feel like Budweiser's the beer for the people, you know? Yeah, totally. I get that. It's not all hoity, tweeds and called itself champagne of beer the way

Miller does. I know. Miller. Fancy. Who do they think they are? Their monocles? Yeah. Top hat and monocles. Miller light out of a champagne flute at the coronation. Are the coronation of the king who we thought to secede from people? Have we forgotten already?

Yeah. Have we forgotten already? It's a blip in history. There you go. Ridiculous. You're such patriots. No, you know, I never want to be called a patriot, but I mean, whatever. You're alienating us.

I am not. I do not identify that way, but we'll, whatever. Cool. So I'll go first. And we'll go back in time. And we are drinking Radiathor, which is water infused with radium. It was a patented mix of water and radium. It was manufactured in 1918 to 1928 by the Bailey Radium Laboratories in New Jersey.

It was like a miracle drug that would make you feel better if you were like in pain or whatever. That was what it was supposed to be used for. A man named Eben Byers in 1927 got injured and he was prescribed by his doctor to drink radio. So the bottles are really small and he drank about 1,400 of them before his face fell off. Have you heard of this guy? No, but the drink itself sounds, oh, wait, I have kind of, I think I have heard of this guy. I'm going to send you a picture of his face. Oh, God.

So this is a drug or a drink that was specifically created just to cause cancer. Is that the idea? No. It was supposed to make you feel better. I kind of like him. It's terrifying. His half of his face is like literally not there. Like he would be really good in like a horror movie, but I guess I didn't have war movies back then.

No, it is a nightmare. So why was he, why did he drink 1,400 of them? Because it was supposed to make, it made him feel better. Like, give him like energy at first. But then it's obviously that caused all these cancers. So we're not talking about him, but we're talking about radium. So. Wait, Taylor, did you know that it, Eben, Bindon.

is short for Ebenezer. Ebenez? Yeah, it's short for Ebene. His name is actually Ebenezer buyer. I love it. We need more Ebenezers. That's another one, Fars, when you have children. Ebenezer, Silk and Sanj.

Wait, this guy... This guy lived for 52 years. Yeah. Did he die of this? I don't think so. I don't know. So he carried on living with half a face. It's so scary.

I don't know, like, where you put your food. I don't know, like, anything about this. Oh, no, he did die. He did have this, right? Yeah, yeah. He died from multiple radiation-induced cancers after consuming radiathor. Yeah. Popular patent medicine made from radium dissolved in water.

And apparently, he was like a really good golfer, too. I know. I was going to say that. Our stories have such weird through lines. I know. I was really like a Wikipedia page last night. And I was like, oh, he could have been a famous golfer, but his face fell off. But he didn't murder anybody.

So, tomato tree. Wow. Okay. But we're not talking about, Evan. We're talking about the mother and father of radioactivity, Marie and Pierre Curie. Sweet. I'm going to throw it. So did you read the Google AI guy quit this week? Did you see that in the newspapers? I did. He sounds so annoying. He sounds like one of those dwebes that you just want to steal a stapler.

He reminds me of Marie and Pierre Curie and a couple other, like, historical people were like if i didn't do it someone else was going to you know like i created a monster and it was coming anyway so i i did it like that i think that's kind of what that guy was saying same with like the right brothers so i read a book about the the right brothers a while ago maybe i'll talk about them in the future but they one of them died earlier but one of them lived all the way through world war two so he saw like all of the devastation that came with knowing how to fly but like what are the like what are the consequences one of the benefits you know like you know what I mean so I am oh my god what's this guy's name well I gotta find this guy real

quick oh Weinstein professor annoying yeah there he is Brett so I went to this um this fucking guy I went to this um conference in Austin like a couple of weeks ago and it was like this independent movement conference and so it was just it was really interesting actually I had a great time there but they had this panel and on the panels they would also have like an AI. So like these people would answer the questions that the moderator would pose. And then the moderator would say, and now let's ask AI what it thinks. And they would like play this audio recording of like what the AI bought on Chad GBT thinks. You know, do you know Brett Weinstein is? No. Okay. So you came to prominence at Evergreen College as a professor of biology who I forgot what

he, there was something he did around like racism that like really flare people up. It was probably stupid it was probably stupid but it was also like probably overreaction to it and now he's like this really popular figure in like the counterculture like he's always on jo rogan's podcast and stuff like that but he was on this panel and every time the ai would speak he'd be like don't crap it you're teaching it stuff stop it this is not good it's like god you are such a bummer man like it's like it's a human advancement sure it's gonna happen whatever just let it let it let the box take over sorry i'm reeling your story go ahead no but that's exactly right it's gonna happen like you can't stop it you know you can't stop the ai you can't stop people for learning

how to fly i know i was in l.a last week and there was a big billboard for there's an an oppenheimer movie or show coming up you know so like opanheimer was like i have to do this otherwise the nazis are going to do it you know like we have to do it first like though and it's even though like knowing that it's like technically a bad thing you know but you have to do it first. So I'm thinking about, one more thing. Brett Weinstein only wears open-toed sandals. Ew. I know. And he's like fucking 57. So it's like yellow toes. Anyways, go ahead. Ew. I'm sorry to hear that. That's disgusting. Ew. So, okay. So that's the lens that we're thinking of. Like, you know, we're, we're at an evolution and like what humans know during this time. So for my

my source is this book called Radioactive. It's so good. So I listened to the, audiobook, but it's based on a graphic novel. So I bought the graphic novel, visual portion. Look how cool it is. I'll take pictures. It has like cool pictures and stuff and like drawings that page is blank. You know what I mean? It's cool. How is that a graphic novel? Because it's got pictures and it's a novel. Isn't that same thing? I think like Frank Miller when I think of graphic novels, but it's fine. Okay. Whatever. It's great. And it also is a movie that is it's on Amazon called Radioactive. Anna Taylor Joy is in it. She's in everything. So, whatever. So I also, okay, so thinking about Marie and Pierre Curie, I tend to like get super

into like the subjects that I'm researching each week. So like being, thinking like Marie Curie is fun because you have to be super smart, like smarter than everyone. And you have great posture. I don't right now. But she like had a great posture. She was super smart. And she didn't like indulge. Like Oscar Wilde when we talked about him, he was like super smart, but he was like indulgent. You know, he was like like, like Marie Curie would never have gotten fat. She was just like studied and like wanted to like be smarter than everyone because she was. and, like, knew that she could be. So this is basically a book report of this book that I read, this graphic novel.

And I also am like, why are book reports, like, in the culture bad or, like, annoying? When I'm like, if I read a book, I want to talk about it. Of course I do. So I'm excited to book report this to you. Well, I think it's bad because if you force someone to read a book. Yes, true. But if you're, like, choose a book. Exactly.

Yeah. So I kind of mentioned some other, you know, Oppenheimer. We'll talk more about some of these tragedies that came out of this. At the end of the film radioactive, they have Marie Curie, like, as she's dying, they have her, like, walking through, like, the ruins of Chernobyl and, like, Hiroshima and, like, things like that. Like, they have her, like, kind of seeing the future, which is interesting. So we'll recap those at the end.

So Pierre Curie, who was older, he was born on May 15th, 1859 in Paris. His father was a doctor, encouraging to go into science. He had a degree by the time he was 16 and started working at the Sorbonne, which is a school in Paris. They say that, like, all the time. So Sorbonne. Marie was born Maria Sloddiscova on November 7th, 1867 in Warsaw, Poland. So she was the youngest of six children in Russian-controlled Poland. It was very tightly controlled by the Russian government at this time.

When she was 16, she went to visit family in the Carpathian Mountains and started to really get into science and nature. sure. I only really mentioned that also because whenever I hear Carpathia, I think of Vigo from Carpathia, which is also from Ghostbusters too. Yes, we did not record that part, but me and I were discussing Ghostbusters earlier on before we started recording. So another Ghostbusters 2 reference, but yeah, so, you know, Vigo of Carpathia, if you know, you know. So Maria, when she was still Maria, she wanted to study, she was really smart and she wanted to learn more. The Russian, like, rulers didn't want Polish people, especially women, to get an education. They wanted to like Polish, like Polish history, culture, language.

You don't want anybody to learn anything. They just wanted them to like, you know, serve Russia. So she joined a secret school called the Flying University, which is called Flying because it was like in secret places and they would take like math classes and chemistry and like all, like in people's apartments and back rooms and that kind of thing. The Flying University was founded in 1882, and she attended from 1891 to 92 before she got the money to

to study at the Sorbonne in Paris. and it was eventually shut down the flying university by Russia in 1905, which is probably a fun story that maybe we can talk about later. But that's pretty cool. But before she was able to go to Paris, she needed to raise some money. So she took a job as a governess for a family just outside of Warsaw. While she was there, she fell in love with the son of the family. He was older and they fell in love.

And his parents were like, you can't marry her. She's just like a common person. So he left her and left her kind of heartbroken. So by the time she moves to Paris, she's like heartbroken, and she's really intent on studying. She lives in, like, a small, like, attic room where it's always cold, and she just, like, reads and just, like, learns, and she got this spot at the Sorbant to study. Out of 1,800 students that were there, only 23 were women, and so she was one of those. So now she's in Paris. So now both of them are in Pierre and Marie.

She changed her name from Myra to Marie to sound more French. both of them are at the Sorbonne starting magnetism they're setting like magnets are heating up metals trying to figure out if it can do different things things like that and also I wanted to note like she does change her name to Marie but she did want to be called skalskova curie professionally so she always was like really attached to Poland and wish she could go back but it was like too dangerous for her to be there she was in a lab that was very crowded and so someone got her space in pierre's lab and like I don't even know what that means like can you you imagine working in a lab i mean i've taken biology classes where you have to be in a lab it's just like

i just imagine being like oh i need more space for my graduated cylinders like i can't have i need more time with his bunsen burner yeah i mean it's like when you had like split the frog between you and like three other kids you know when you dissected it or the earthworm yes it's probably just like that totally oh my god my friend aldi who i was good friends with in high school we dissected the frog together and i don't know like what cologne he wore but then just from then on he smelled like dead frogs to me like he didn't but it associated with the dead frogs you know so i was just like did you all get the fetal pigs no we got fetal pigs how is that uh i don't know if that's good for a young mind to be exposed to it probably has

my obsession with true crime probably has something to do with having just cut up in the guts of a fetal animal and here we are here we are so pierre and maria working together and lab, he gave her some space in his lab. They ended up, you know, falling in love. They got married on July 26, 1895. They honeymooned in the French countryside. And they were just super happy. They were really, like, happy to be working together. Two years later, they had a daughter, Irene, pronounced Yeren, because they're French. And now they're in their lab. And they're working together. They're very happy. They work like very side by side. They like write notes together. Like they, like, there's pages of notes that have like both their handwritings on it. Like,

they're really working together, like really great. And this is a really fucking exciting time to be a scientist because of all these things that are happening. So they didn't invent the x-ray in, which I feel like is something that I heard and like thought, but they did not. So in 1895, a German man named Wilhelm Rottengan noticed that stuff in his lab was like making things glow. And he didn't know what it was.

So we called it an x-ray, X as an unknown. So that's what he was, he found it. he was the first person to actually take an x-ray he took an x-ray of his wife's hand and wait I think I have it in this book I'll show you um I took an x-ray of his wife's hand and when she saw it she said I've seen my death it was the first time anybody had seen bones like that which is pretty pretty wild that was like just a little bit over a hundred years ago I mean back then they thought that taking a picture of you was stealing your soul so I can't imagine what the hell this look like for fucking real like just like how scary would that be to be like oh my god I have bones like if you

think about the fact that I'm like a skull that's scary but I don't think about it we're just we're just bones tissue yeah I don't know if I can find it but here and read do look kind of cool like they look kind of badass in this picture yeah oh this is the hand that's the first x-ray ever yeah and this is like her ring she was wearing and then like her hand yeah she got so much cancer after that was oh 100% yeah I know she was definitely like they were like licking it after it was on you know so meanwhile another scientist named henri becarl had some uranium like in his office like you do and he put in a drawer with a photographic plate and like went home for the weekend and then when he came back the photographic plate looked as if it had been exposed to light so that's when they discovered

that uranium could glow is that is that a big discovery yes because and so what that what that did is it inspired the curies to start studying these substances they even needed new glass wear like new shapes of glassware so she learned how to blow glass to like figure this out so they're like doing chemistry things they're boiling things they're trying to separate these atoms what they're discovering is that the atom is not the smallest thing so people thought that the atom was like indivisible you can't break an atom and they were finding out that you can and you can manipulate it to make these like other elements essentially is what they discovered marie she was the first person to use the word radioactivity so that's the shit that's what she called the process

of like changing the atom to make another element she also slept with a little bottle of like glowing radium like in her bed because she was like constantly thinking about it they just like didn't know it was like brand new you know like i felt like i was kind of thinking like when you were talking about like nirvana being like this is music that no one's ever heard before you know like this is a discovery that like no one knows anything about like this is brand new which is so so in this hypothetical is Kurt Cobain Marie Curie and Peter is Courtney Love? I think so, yeah. Okay. Yeah. Thanks for putting in an analogy that I would understand. You got it. You got it. Another fun kind of side note is that like people, some people who like loved the glowingness of radium and radioactivity were people who did seances. So this was like also like a big time for like spiritualism. So, you know, they're like, oh, now I can like, you know, make the air glow and I can like paint the ceiling a weird thing and like make things seem more ghostly and like things like that.

So people whose dance has used it all the time as well. And also people were like, well, you can see our bones now. Why can't we see ghosts next? You know, like what's next? It was like, what's next for like human science? Like if science can find a way to like look into our bodies, can it find a way to like look into other things? Because another thing that they were discovering is that like there's invisible things

all around us, you know, like air is full of atoms. Like everything is like invisible, but we can still like see through it. So super exciting. There was like a dancer who wanted a dress made out of like, like all like radioactive materials when she was dancing she was like glowing and like people loved it um it was also in like a whole bunch of stuff like the radithor things like that because they didn't patent it they could have and they could have made a lot of money on it but they didn't because they were like this is like an important scientific discovery for the world so people

just kind of ran with it this kind of reminds me of your story of the bounty where they're just like eating these like incredibly precious rare turtles like they're nothing in here they're just like willy-nilly just throwing around uranium like it's not like now it's probably one of the hardest substances on earth to like get your hands on yeah and they're just like painting the walls with it exactly they're like rolling around their hands being like this is cool you know not good they also discovered they discovered radium first and then they discovered polonium which is another another radioactive thing and she at polonium after Poland, after her home country. People just loved it, and it was everywhere.

In 1900, Pierre, I don't know, as an experiment, puts him radium in a little jar, and he tied it to his arm to see what would happen. Like, what would happen if it kept it this close to me for, like, a certain, a long period of time? So after 40 days, it did start to, like, create, like, a big open wound on his arm. And so that was, like, a big discovery because it could destroy tissue, so could it destroy disease tissue? And basically, this is the only thing that we have that's a good care for cancer is. Really? Yeah. In France. Wait, that's what chemotherapy is? Is like uranium poisoning? Yeah, it's radiation. Yeah. It's radiation killing your cells and hopefully killing the bad ones. And what it does is it fundamentally changes the DNA of the cells to make sure

it doesn't, so it either doesn't, so it doesn't reproduce or it's too damaged to go. like to continue to live and that's what it that's what it is in france they call chemotherapy curie therapy oh wow okay yeah so essentially like that's that's the big thing yeah yeah yeah the cures cancer yeah so i mean it's 123 years later it's like that's like the best we can do still also in 1903 pierre and marie won the Nobel Prize she was the first women to to to win it the prize the Nobel Prize the Nobel Prize you know still exists today you know it was created by Alfred Nobel he's the person who invented dynamite and with all of his

dynamite money he created this like prize there's a whole bunch of different you know categories that you can win one in when you win you get a gold medal a circle gold medal a diploma and you get about a million dollars it's pretty yeah when you win

all that dynamite money all that dynamite money so pierre went to Sweden alone to accept the award kind of because she was a woman and men are awful and they like wanted to give it to her but they didn't really want to see her getting it and also because she wasn't feeling well

like she was starting to get sick and so was everybody like everybody's finally starting to get sick pierre was especially sick and he was in a lot of pain he was like coughing up blood um pierre's the one who like strapped it to his body for 40 days right yeah yeah so he's super sick and they're like uh oh like this thing that we invented or discover that we thought was amazing is like making people sick and now they're starting to see it so actually so they get the Nobel Prize in 1903 in 1906 pierre was walking alone at night in Paris and he may have been sick, he may have made a wrong turn, like, whatever, but he got hit by a carriage. The horses, like, kind of like trampled him a little bit, but then the wheels of the carriage

split his head open, and he died. So he died with his brains all over the street, which is not, not pretty. So where does uranium come from? Is it created through other elements, or do you just, like, mine for it and you find it in the earth? I think that you have to, like, get it. Uranium, I don't know. Radium, you have to, like, make out of other elements, I think. Are you looking at it?

Well, where does uranium come from? Okay, that's probably a better thing to search. So uranium naturally occurs, it's in, in, like, ore. So you can get uranium from, like, ore, but radium, it's, okay, radium is come from the decay of uranium. so they like sped up like half life and like the decay of their uranium and that's what made the radium okay well i'm glad i asked i mean i'm glad you asked you because i don't know i only still sort of understand it but yeah you know like yeah that's what i'm saying like they're in their lab like they figure out they it took like millions of gallons of water and like millions of

hours and millions of like cubits of gas to like heat the water and all these things to get like half a gram of radium you know like so they'd have like distill it in some way right so marie was devastated she had two kids at this point pierre is gone so she was given pierre's professorship at the sarban which is bittersweet um because uh you know it was exciting that she was able to to get that job so he was a professor there she was the first woman she's actually also the first woman in france to get a phd and so she was now a professor Four years later, after Pierre's death, Marie began an affair with a former student of Pierre's named Paul Langavan. Paul Langavan was married.

So that was the bad thing when they, like, had their affair. And his wife was really pissed, like, fair. But she, in the movie, is played by the woman who plays Jen Barber in the IT crowds. She's like hard to stay seriously because she's so funny in the IT crowd. But so she was like going to make it public. She's going to publish their letters. she's going to tell everybody. She wanted a divorce. She was just like so mad about this. Paul himself was super smart. In the 1940s, he would be arrested by the Nazis for being in the French resistance. So he's super cool. Einstein, literally Einstein wrote that Paul would have been the guy to discover the theory of relativity if he would have had more time. Like Einstein was a little bit older or younger than him. So he was able to do it. But Einstein was like, this guy's as smart as me. This is a bunch of like real smart people. So like Paul and Marie and Pierre, smart. people. People started to get mad at Marie for having this affair because starts to get public. They start calling her names like an immigrant and like, you know, calling her a Jew as like an insult when she wasn't. She was Catholic. But like people just like wanted her out of France because of this, which is really weird because you're like, who cares? You know, she's one of the smartest people. Also, wouldn't you like, yeah, wouldn't you take pride in having? I mean, yeah. Like, she's ridiculously smart. Like, get over it. And then speaking of Einstein while she's in the middle of this, Einstein wrote her.

letter that was like, oh, don't worry, you know, your personal life isn't, you know, like, whatever, who cares about your personal life? And then they also noted in this book that Einstein also had just had like a child with one of his students. And then also he ended up marrying his cousin, which I didn't know. Yeah, I remember he married his cousin. Yeah. So lots of cousin, cousin lovers. People were hard to find back then. There's so many people, I guess. Paul's wife, you know, wanted to break them up. There were duels, between, there's a duel between Paul and a reporter that involved guns, but they didn't shoot.

They were like, this is silly, like, that's not shoot. So all this crazy stuff is happening in her personal life. In the middle of it, Marie wins a second Nobel Prize. So she's not only the first woman to win a Nobel Prize. She's the first person to win one twice. This time she won for chemistry. Sweden asked her not to come to the ceremony because of this affair and this scandal in the paper.

And she said, quote, there's no connection between my scientific work and the facts of my private life. So she's like, fuck you, I'm super smart. I'm coming. So she went to Sweden and accepted her second Nobel Prize. Eventually, Paul and his wife do get divorced, but the spark between Marie and Paul was gone, and they stopped being together.

So now, it's World War I. And Marie is sick. She's super sick. Like, she's going to die from all of this radiation poisoning that she's had. Ren, their daughter, is also a scientist. She is also super smart. she ends up with her husband winning another Nobel Prize later. So like the family is out of control.

During World War I, it's still like the beginning of not like, you know, of like science, like medicine and all those things. So like they're still using like Civil War style like medicine. So like people are getting amputated like everywhere. So like if you're like my foot hurts, they're going to cut it off. They're not going to look at it. They're not going to be like, oh, maybe your toes broken. They're going to just cut it off.

It's like what they've been doing. And Iran goes to her mom. mom, and she's like, mom, you can help these people by giving them x-rays. So they invented the first portable x-ray machines, and they brought them to the battlefields of World War I. They made 18 mobile x-rays, so they put them in like an ambulance and 200 non-mobile ones and just saved countless lives because they were like, this guy's hand is broken. He needs a sling.

He doesn't need to have his arm cut off. Right. And so it saved a ton of people. Also, going back to Paul, just I think one more thing about him, he, he, created the first submarine detector. So he essentially created sonar. So they did a lot of help during the wars as well, during both world wars. So after this, Marie developed an institute, the Curie Institute in Paris, where people could study. She went to the U.S. She met with President Harding. She, like, traveled around the world, talking about what she had learned.

But her health was failing, obviously. She could barely see. She could barely walk. She passed away on July 4th, 1934, of various radiation poisonings that led to, like, anemia. Makes sense. Aren and her husband also, you know, they won that Nobel Prize, but they also had some health problems because of all of the radiation. They had a daughter named Helena, and Helena in 1948 married Paul's grandson. So Marie and Paul, their grandchildren, got married, which is lovely. Yeah, that's cute.

Because they were happy to. So Marie and Pierre are both interned in the Pantheon and Pantheon. Paris. Their bodies were moved there in 1995. They were in a cemetery and they got moved there. Their bodies and their work are still super radioactive. Their coffins are lined with lead. And if you wanted to actually look at their like notebooks, you have to like wear a hazmat suit. And you can't touch it. With the way that half with the way that radium works like the half life. So like half life is like and this time it'll be half and then it gets like faster and faster. Her body will be half as radioactive as it is right now in 1500 years.

so she's going to be radioactive for like a really long time but how was she when she died like 64 that's she lived like a i mean for that time that's probably like a normal lifespan right yeah i think so too all things considered yeah just juggling with the most toxic chemical substances in the world yeah like literally holding it that's that's their story and you no matter what happened you know from their discoveries like maria sclatova aka marie curie she was like obviously like a pioneer for women in science. She broke down glass ceilings or even heard about glass ceilings. But I do want to talk about some of the bad things, like some of the kind of crazy things that happened, you know, from these discoveries. So in the 1920s, also in New Jersey, I don't

if you heard this story, but there was a watch factory called the U.S. Radium Corporation. And they would make those watches to make the hands glow, which is great. And the way they would do that is they would paint the hands with radioactive paint. And it was such a fine line needed to paint that the women who did it would just like lick the brushes. So their faces also fell off. Yeah. About 800 women were working there. Many of them died of cancer. Most of them. And then many of them had like huge problems with their face, like their whole face like decaying. They won a landmark case for workers' rights in 1928, but many of them were already dead by that time. Yeah. I remember this story. Yeah. Also, obviously like the nuclear bombs, you know, those, that technology

came from this. We know about, you know, the Manhattan Project, physicist and the Manhattan project named Irving S. Lowen. He defied orders to keep it tap secret. So it was a total secret. Like the president didn't even know about it. And to tie back to another episode, he talked to Eleanor Roosevelt because no one would listen to him. This scientist from the Manhattan Project, Irving Llewin, talked to ER. She talked to FDR and was like, they need more money because if they don't do this, the Nazis are going to do it first. So like that is the absolute worst case scenario is if the Nazis get a nuclear bomb you know so we have to do work it faster so they got more money but irving lowen was fired and never like got any like recognition for me and the person that

like actually got it over over the thing obviously we the u.s got it first on august 6th 1945 at 815 in the morning the united states bombed the city of hiroshima japan the stories are unbelievable the destruction and the confusion everybody holding their skin in the movie they do a great scene where it's like they're in Japan and there's like kids running in the streets and like all these beautiful signs and like all this like stuff and then someone looks up and just like sees it coming and they just like get destroyed in this picture in this book that I have I'll take a picture of this too there's like this paper cut out of someone like a black figure of a body and this Japanese woman had cut it out as like an art project because she when she found her father after

the bomb he was totally black his skin was totally black and when she touched him the skin came off and she saw his muscles like that's how burned you know people and people were just like carrying their skin and then obviously tons of people more people died because of radiation afterwards so unbelievable in the 1950s they were still doing nuclear tests in nevada around all these like fake towns where they would like fill the houses with like you know mannequins from jc penny and yeah we've all we've all seen the hills have eyes yes exactly so like that and it was that it was also a new west anderson movie that they're in one of those towns too that's coming out i think soon so that'll be fun so every but everyone who lived around those towns has cancer you know it's just obviously

one of my favorite stories is i'm not looking this up now was oppenheimer getting a meeting with president truman and just being like this is the worst thing in the world i have blood on my hands this and this and the other thing and i'm reading this quote from wikipedia where it says the remark infuriated Truman and who put an end to the meeting. Truman later told his undersecretary, I don't want to see that son of a bitch of my office ever again. So he like really pissed Truman off by being all whiny about like the bomb. He was like, yeah, I got to make the decision and whatever you can feel however you want to feel about it. Yeah. That's that's a but also heard that mostly what the reason why America did that to Hiroshima and Nagasaki was actually

mostly to deter Russia or the USSR. It actually had nothing to do with trying to save like American lives and the war quickly. It had more to do with like we need them to know that we are serious. Yeah. I mean, someone had to do it first. You know. Did they

have to? Yes. And I think that's that's the part that with like all these bad things like, you know, creating the AI that's going to destroy the world. Like someone's going to do it. It's happening. You know, there's no way to stop it. Yeah. It's also been some nuclear reactor disasters in 1979,

Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania, people there all have cancer. Everyone is dead or dying. Also in the 80s, obviously, the Chernobyl exploded. There's a great series in HBO about Chernobyl. But in both those cases, it's like a great series of like small failures

that led to a huge failure. You know, like one person was late. One person like spilled their coffee on the board. One person like didn't read one rule, like whatever. And it's like compounded into something. really really terrible a lot of people died there as well 2006 i don't know if you remember this but a russian spy named alexander the avenko was killed by polonium yeah like stabbed him like they just like punctured him with something maybe like an umbrella i forgot what it was but yeah yeah and he had like a quick

like a i don't know if it was quick but he like you know died of radiation poisoning like pretty pretty and plodium is like impossible to get too so it was like definitely a rush i who did it to him all that. So the good things that, you know, came from this, obviously, like, they proved that atoms had particles. So that's, like, what you learned in elementary school. They were the first nuclear physicists. They are the closest thing to a cure for cancer. They, their work created radiation detectors to, like, help detect radiation, like, in nature. And then understanding, like, the half-life of radium and of different elements can help you understand how old the world is. So it's just, like, obviously, like, an incredible contribution to

science. The next step is, like, literally anything. Like, the only way we're going to to go to space is with nuclear power. So, you know, if we want to, you know, travel the universe, we need it. And there are in space right now, there are asteroids and craters on planets named after the Curies because, like, everyone knows that, that they are, they are the people who are going to make that possible, the way that we get there. So yeah, it could be anything that comes next with that, but it comes from the infinite power of the atom and the curies discovered it. It's very cool. Yeah. Good for them. What a terrible way to go.

Just slowly poisoning yourself with radiation. Yeah, like everything you have is poison. Yeah. There was, did you, when you said the New Jersey story, I thought you were going to talk about that guy who built an atomic, he built like an atom bomb or like a nuclear reactor in his, in his like shed. Did you hear that story? No.

The guy looks like he's melting. oh my god built radio nuclear man nuclear man dc no nuclear man

built reactor and shed i mean once you start googling nuclear stuff i'm just like oh god nuclear boy yeah there he is david han that's it yeah so he um they called

him sometimes called the radioactive Boy Scout or the nuclear Boy Scout. It was a radiation enthusiast and he built a neutron source at the age of 17, FBI, and then the FBI learned he was doing this. Whoa. He died in his hometown. He should not have that stuff. Yeah. Boy Scout 17 and his entire neighborhood radioactive after building a nuclear reactor at his mom's garden.

Yeah. Yep. People shouldn't have that power. Yeah, wild. Wow. Okay. Cool story, Taylor. Thanks.

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