In Our Time - The Curies

Episode Date: March 26, 2015

Melvyn Bragg and his guests discuss the scientific achievements of the Curie family. In 1903 Marie and Pierre Curie shared a Nobel Prize in Physics with Henri Becquerel for their work on radioactivity, a term which Marie coined. Marie went on to win a Nobel in Chemistry eight years later; remarkably, her daughter Irène Joliot-Curie would later share a Nobel with her husband Frédéric Joliot-Curie for their discovery that it was possible to create radioactive materials in the laboratory. The work of the Curies added immensely to our knowledge of fundamental physics and paved the way for modern treatments for cancer and other illnesses.With:Patricia Fara Senior Tutor of Clare College, University of CambridgeRobert Fox Emeritus Professor of the History of Science at the University of OxfordSteven T Bramwell Professor of Physics and former Professor of Chemistry at University College LondonProducer: Simon Tillotson.

Thank you for downloading this episode of In Our Time, for more details about in our time, and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.com.uk slash Radio 4. I hope you enjoy the program. Hello, in 1903, thanks to her work on radioactivity, Mary Curie became the first woman to win a Nobel Prize, sharing it with her husband Pierre and with Henry Beccarell. Mary went on to become the first person to win two Nobel Prizes, and is still the only person to win Nobel's for both physics and chemistry. In the 1930s, the his older daughter, Irene, won a further Nobel Prize for the family and her husband. She won it with her husband. Also for chemistry, for their discovery that it was possible to create radioactive material in the laboratory. And Marie Curie's extraordinary career also included

doing X-ray or driving X-ray laboratories around the Western Front during the First World War. The work of the curers, including their discovery of radium, added immensely to our knowledge of fundamental physics and paved the way for modern treatments for cancer. With me to discuss Principal in Marie Curie are Patricia Farah, senior tutor of Clare College, Cambridge. Stephen Bramwell, Professor of Physics at University College London and Robert Fox, Emeritus Professor of the History of Science

at the University of Oxford. Patricia Farrah, what were the most significant scientific developments towards the end of the 19th century that, as it were, worked towards what Mary Curie did? Well, the most immediate developments were the discoveries of X-rays by Rompkin, and I think the fact that he called it

x-rays indicates the extreme confusion and bewilderment that everyone was feeling at the time. There were all sorts of rays. There were alpha, beta, gamma rays, there were x-rays, there were green glows inside tubes. It was a very sort of mysterious environment for people to work in. What date was that? That was in 1895.

And then the following year, Henri Becherelle discovered that if he had some uranium salts, they could affect a photographic plate through black paper without any sun shining. And so that was the second sort of major event that happened just before Maricuree started working. And the mainstream physicists were very interested in x-rays and also something called cathode rays, which are really rather like an old-fashioned television where you could see a little green glow emanating in the middle of an empty tube.

And what Marie Curie chose to do was to go for the less well publicised event, which was Becker-Ral's discovery of what she herself later called radioactivity. Was there a feeling about an extra-execisement? excitement around that period in the 1890, that these things were happening? Or was it by that time just normal that much scientific advance was underway? I think there was a huge amount of excitement,

but also this sort of bewilderment, this realization that the stability of the world which Victorian physicists had been striving for just wasn't going to be achievable. And there were also a lot of debates about spiritualism, which might sound really quite wacky, but some very, very senior scientists saying, well, if you can have all these glows and these rays,

perhaps it's possible that all the strange things, the aura we're seeing in spiritualist photographs, actually exist. And even Pierre Curie went to a seance, which is an indication of how confused people were at the time. Marie Curie's wrote of in Warsaw, which was run by Russia at the time. She was published but spoke Russian as well.

Can you tell us a little about her background in Warsaw? I think her background was very, very influential on the woman that she became later. She came from a very intellectual, not particularly wealthy, but an intellectual background of Poles who were fiercely patriotic, determined to resist what they saw as Russian oppression. So her father was a physics teacher, her mother ran a girls' boarding school, and that was actually where Marie Curie was brought up for the first few years until her mother died.

Then her father was very egalitarian, and he wanted to give his... daughters the same education as the boys and he wanted to promote their opportunities but in Poland women weren't allowed to go to university so it was quite a lot of Polish young women went to France to study so she reached an agreement with her elder sister Bronya that they would take it in turns to go to France to study so first of all Marie or Maria Schlodowska as she was then went and worked as a governess and she gave all the money that she earned to Bronya so that Bronya could go to Paris and then when Bronyard qualified, the money was given to Manja Shlodowska, and so then it was her turn to go to Paris.

Did Catholicism pay any part in her upbringing? Her mother was a very, very devout Catholic. Her father was an atheist. She herself, when she brought up her daughters, she was very determined that they shouldn't forget their Polish origins. They had Polish governesses. They went back to Poland for the holidays. But she was also very, very careful,

never to teach them about anything spiritual. she gave them very broad education, but she completely avoided anything spiritual. And did the learning of Russian, did that help her in her career? Was she just something that was... She'd learned to, like some people, learn Latin like me, and then more or less forget about it.

I presume it helped her sort of incidentally when she met Russian physicists, but as far as I'm aware, there wasn't any major contribution. I mean, she was a very cultured woman. She spoke several languages, certainly. Robert Fox, when she arrived in Paris in 1890, What was the attitude of Paris or France to the scientific community there?

Well, I think science was very highly regarded. I think that's the first thing that has to be said. The other thing I'd like to pick up on is Patricia's point about the number of foreign women who were studying science in Paris. So I think you have to realize that Murray was by no means alone, which was no means out of her element, I think, at the Sorbonne in the science faculty. If you look at the enrolments in science through the 1890s through to the First World War, there's a significant proportion of women studying science.

And also within that minority, it's a significant minority, and within that minority, there's a substantial cohort of Poles, people from Poland, women from Poland, and Russia. So the other aspect of Paris that she, I think, in which she would have felt very much at home, was the sort of dividing. world. I mean, she'd experienced it in her own family with her father

being something approaching an atheist, very much a believer in science and a positivist, and her mother being a rather conventional Christian. And she would have found that division in French society when she arrived in 1891. And I think you have to realise,

and it's quite difficult for us to get back into that mindset, just how profoundly divided French society was. You have on the one side, you have the the secular Republicans immersed in free thought with a strong dose of anti-clericalism. You have that on the one side, and then you have the predominantly bourgeois, Catholic, conservatives on the other.

So you have a sort of left-right split, but it's a left-right split that's infused with streaks of anti-clericalism on the one hand and defense of the Catholic tradition on the other. And, of course, she'd already made her choice in her family. She'd gravitated towards her father ideologically. And I think when she'd get to Paris, she gravitated again to that secular world. And it was very fierce in Paris at the time, because the state was just about to cast off the church in a way, wasn't it? Yes, it was.

It was in process towards the 1905 major separation of church and state. And you have to remember that the whole Dreyfus affair was beginning to gather momentum during the 1890s. And these are her early years in Paris. The wrongful accusation of a Jewish officer that he was betraying his country. Exactly so. Which French intellectual took up in his defence,

but a lot of the French public handed him for it. And he was maliciously imprisoned for a long time. Exactly so. And it was only in 1898, which is, after all, seven years after Maori arrives in Paris. It was only in 1898 that Drey, Dreyfus was eventually vindicated. She married Pierre Curie.

Can you tell us a bit about him? Yes, Pierre Curie, unlike Murray, was 100% Parisian. But they had a lot in common. They were both totally dedicated to science, and I think they were both dedicated to science as a pure intellectual pursuit. In other words, not to science as the road to material advancement, anything of that sort.

That wasn't the sort of science they wanted to do. They were both disdainful of honours and decorations. They both at various times in their lives refused the Legion of Honor, for example. And they were both at home in this rather slightly leftist secular world. How would you... Sorry about the word. How was he rated as a sign? What was he thought of as a sign?

He already had a considerable reputation. He'd gone through the... usual French examinations and so on. But since 1883, he'd worked not as a professor, but as what was called a chef de Travo, which meant that he was in charge of the laboratories and all the experimental work at a very modern new school called the School of Industrial Physics and Chemistry, only founded in 1883. And that was a school that prepared engineers for the upper middle levels of French industry. And there, as chef de Travo, he'd had time for his research and he had already a significant scientific reputation mainly through his discovery

with his elder brother Jacques of the phenomenon of pieto electricity and that had attracted attention not only in France but also internationally. Stephen Bramwell, Mercury Salli, investigated what were known as Uranic Rays. Can you tell us about that and what you did? So Uranic rays, as has already been mentioned, were these very strange, rather weak rays that were given off by uranium compounds. People weren't that much interested in them. They were much less spectacular than the x-ray that Rundgen had discovered, and it seemed a good topic for Mary to study for her doctoral work. In this work, she was greatly aided by an invention of Pierre's. Pierre had invented an instrument that could measure electrical current down to something like one trillionth of an amp,

which is a pico amp in modern parlance, very, very sensitive measuring device. Now, these Uranic rays were known to ionise the air, so they make the air conducting. And hence, if you measure the current through the air with Pierre's brilliant device, you could have a quick and very accurate way of assessing the level of radioactivity. Now, what Mary did was she used that to basically screen all sorts of chemical compounds and all sorts of chemical elements, pretty much everything she could get her hands on. She was well connected in Paris. She knew a lot of chemists, including some of the best chemists in the world,

and she collected chemical compounds and elements and tested them for radioactivity. Now, as a result of this, she understood that radioactivity, the becorel type, was a property of chemical elements, which at that stage were thought to be indivisible chemical substances. And she discovered two chemical elements, as well as uranium, there was thorium, which is a naturally occurring element, which is also radioactive. She wasn't quite the first to get to that. but she then went on and started looking at minerals, which was a very interesting idea, so naturally occurring rocks and minerals. And in particular, she looked at a mineral called Pitch Blend,

which is a uranium ore mined in Bohemia. Uranium was used, for example, for pigments and glazes. It often has beautiful colours associated with it. So she looked at the radioactivity of Pitch Blend and discovered it. it was roughly three times as radioactive, as it should have been for the amount of uranium in it, according to how she understood this. And then she made the brilliant connection that there must be some other chemical elements in the pitch blend. Now, she was right about that, it turned out, and she eventually discovered two new chemical elements in the pitchbren,

polonium and radium. what she didn't realize at the time was the amount of those elements in the pitch blend is really tiny. So one ton of pitch blend contained something like a tenth of a gram of uranium and much less polonium. And yet she embarked on this, what turned into a massive task to extract this, what she thought were new elements that were somewhere in this uranium ore, the pitch blend. She's looking in every ton of pitch space you're looking for about a gram. She's even less than a gram actually in a ton of pitch blend.

It makes needles in Haystack look like a summertime pastime, doesn't it? Absolutely, because you have to also realize that it's not even in one place. It's spread throughout the whole of the ore, basically, and you've got to get it out. She had to sort of... And she's doing this with assistance, she's stirring great vat.

What's happening in this laboratory? This shed that they got here, husband. I kept complaining about it being a shed. That's right. So she called it a miserable old shed. It's in the beautiful Latin quarter of Paris, but nevertheless a miserable old shed. And so what she would do was she obtained the uranium ore, the pitch blend, and she'd start by stirring it in big vats, trying to dissolve it up. Now, what she was really doing here was applying the classical techniques of chemical analysis.

and in those days this was a very advanced science. People knew how to separate big mixtures, but you needed to know what you were doing and you needed to do it very carefully. So the principle technique really is to, for example, try dissolving it in, say, hydrochloric acid or sulfuric acid. Some bits will dissolve, some bits won't. And so gradually she was able to

in smaller and smaller flasks and beakers, isolate all the bits of the uranium ore. And she was able to track this with her radiation detector and eventually get very concentrated radioactivity in small beakers and flasks. And then what, Patricia Farah? Well, she managed to discover two new elements, one of which she named polonium,

which I think was quite a significant choice of name. I wonder if it was sort of rather analogous to somebody calling something Ukrainian these days. I mean, it was quite a political statement. And then later on they discovered Radium. Then in 1903, she and Pierre were jointly awarded the Nobel Prize in conjunction with Henri Beccarell. I think it's quite interesting to see how the prize is divided up. Beccarell got half. Pierre Curie was going to be the other person who was awarded the Nobel Prize,

and there just happened apparently to be one person on the Nobel Prize awarding committee who said, oh, I think Marie ought to get a bit of this prize as well. So she and Pierre shared that price between, that half the prize between me. In the notes of one of you, it said that Pierre made the intervention

and said he wouldn't accept the prize unless she was an equal share of his prize. Is that wrong? One of you said it. Probably they're not mutually exclusive. Probably both of them can be true. Yes, I think I am responsible for that, Melvin. And I think the sort of little thing I would add to what Patricia has said

is that a group of 20 academicians from the French Academy of Science wrote to the Nobel authorities, urging that the prize should be given to Monsieur Beccarell on the one hand and Pierre Curie on the other. And it's interesting that there wasn't any mention in that recommendation of Murray. And what I said in my note to you, Melvin, I think was that Pierre Curie intervened and said, look, we can't, you know, marry was at least as much involved as I was. But I agree with you, Patricia, that both of those things could well be true.

So we've got this radium. To what use was it put in the early years? Well, nobody really knew quite what to do with it. But there was a strong suspicion that it would have a medical use. And Pierre had done some experiments which suggested that tumours in animals, might be killed by their exposure to radium. Did it's characteristic of burning? Was that from the very start?

People were burnt. Yes, it would burn. Beccarell himself, for example, had no idea what he was having in his pocket. He carried around his pocket, and of course suddenly found he had a great sort of burn on the side of his... Which would be a file of radium. Yes, exactly, exactly that.

And certainly over the years, anybody who'd worked in that area would find that they had sores, on the ends of their fingers. And there were other symptoms as well. I mean, lassitude, aching in the limbs and so on. Clearly, over time, it had a very dileterious effect on health. Yes, so it might be worth mentioning that radium and its salts were like nothing

that any human being had ever experienced before. These were materials that continually glowed in the dark. They seemed to be an infinite source of energy. They were warm to the touch. Radium, as Pierre showed, could melt its own weight of ice in an hour. And this was, everybody was incredibly excited by this material, which seemed to be a sort of magical material. But people quickly realized that it had a sinister side as well,

that it could burn you and you didn't even feel it happening. Can I just pick up a stitch back with you, Patricia? The fact that she was included in the Nobel Prize was quite significant. I mean, it was absolutely extraordinary that a woman, should be awarded a Nobel Prize. I mean, she was the first woman to be awarded the Nobel Prize. I think she achieved great popularity. The event was seen as being very, very significant,

but they were regarded very much as a couple. And the way that they were recognised gave priority to him over her. For example, he was made a professor afterwards, whereas she wasn't. And I think the attitude is quite well summarised in a caricature that came out in Vanity Fair, the London publication.

It came out in a series, called Men of the Year. And there's this marvellous picture of Pierre holding up a test tube of radium chloride and it's glowing out and it's shining onto his forehead. So it's quite, and he's holding a book, so it's quite clear that he's made the discovery. And she's this rather

sort of timid, demure woman behind him so peering up over his shoulder. And I think that sums up quite well. It sums up a vanity fair, yeah. We need to take that on that seriously, do we? We need to take that on that seriously, didn't we? General attitudes as well. Yeah, yeah. And does it?

Well, perhaps, you know, you know, but, I do it. So that's far I don't think that's, anyway. Steve, at about the same time, around about the same time, with Ernest Rutherford, in Canada and in England, moving towards the atom, as it were. Were they aware of each other? Was there a competition? Was there an exchange?

I think, you know, I mean, science is a kind of free-for-all and quite a few scientists started looking at uranium rays at about the same time as Marion. One of them was the young Ernest Rutherford. Like Mary, he was a bit of an outsider, a New Zealand boy from a farm who penetrated the sort of stuffy English establishment. Now, their work proceeded in parallel, and they were aware of each other's work. Interestingly, Rutherford gravitated towards the physics of the phenomenon, so less interested in the materials, more interested in the sort of generalities of what was.

going on and the nature of the rays themselves, for example. Mary gradually, although she started as a physicist, she gradually drifted towards the more chemical side, the material side. She was very keen to get radium in its pure form, for example, and things like this. So gradually, as the sort of smoke cleared, you had two great scientists. Rutherford became the pioneer of nuclear physics. You went on to discover the nuclear atom, the proton, and all of the things. this. Mary really became the pioneer of nuclear chemistry of the materials aspect of it. It appears

that Rutherford and Mary respected each other. Rutherford appeared at Mary's, once she'd done her doctorate, for example, to congratulate her. And although there must have been a fierce competition there, because science is competitive, they pretty much retained good relations, I believe. Did those two ideas converge in any way? Do you mean the physics aspect and the chemistry aspect? Were they in one way working towards what became a hole? Well, I think I would go down Stephen's track a little bit there and suggest they were rather separate.

And I think one reason for the sort of high respect we tend to have for Rutherford today, and, you know, Maori important but probably a little bit less visible publicly, I think one reason for that is that we tend to, place physics, the sort of work that Rutherford was doing, the investigation of the structure of the atom and that sort of thing, on a higher plane than what Maori was doing. And I would say that one aspect of what Stephen was talking about that perhaps I could just pick up on Stephen is that

Maori was sort of engaged in almost in a factory activity, you know, she's stirring these great vats, and she's very much involved in that side of thing, which is the sort of work that you'd never find being done at the Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge at the time. But I think she was important because she made a very, very bold hypothesis quite near the beginning that this radioactivity must be an atomic phenomenon rather than a chemical.

And that was a very important and quite a brave step to make. And it was because she had that insight and was able to demonstrate it that then Rutherford and all the other people who penetrated inside, the atom were able to do that. So I think she made a very important theoretical first step, but then her own interests went off more into production, manufacture, establishing standards, and then, as you mentioned, into the First World War and the medical work.

Yeah, but when she got the Nobel Prize, did we see her being encouraged, stepping out more firmly in her own right, although we're told by Stephen she was well connected a few years after she got into Paris, so she must have known how to work the system. Unlike her husband Pierre, she was a great wheeler dealer. She knew very well how to promote herself, and she was interested in doing that.

In a sense, they were the perfect partnership because he tended to sort of drift around from subject to subject, not be particularly interested in promoting his own interests. She definitely did. But even so, after the Nobel Prize, it was him that got the professorship and he worked at the Sorbonne. And she remained an assistant professor working at a girls' college. So I think it was very difficult for people to accept her as a woman and also to treat her equally. I think that's important at scientific conferences.

People didn't treat her in the same way as they would a man. She was always recognised to be a woman. Stephen, Simon. Yes, and I think it shouldn't be forgotten, though, what's a tremendous chemist, Mary was. And chemists of the time, I think, really recognised this. I mean, this was a very, very... exciting moment for chemistry. You had two new elements that were like nothing else that had ever

been discovered. Mara... The two she discovered, polonium and radium. Now, normally the discovery of a chemical element to chemists was the biggest thing in chemistry. These were not only new elements. They were different type of elements and it had been done with the most beautiful, precise, classical chemistry. And I think chemists loved that at the time. And, you know, Mary is, you know, As Robert said, we tend to put physics on a higher plane because it's a little bit cleverer perhaps, but chemistry is a beautiful thing, and Mary did it brilliantly.

She was a great chemist, you know. Back as it were to the life, in 1906, P.F. was killed by a, fell under a horse-drawn carriage and was killed almost immediately. And that obviously had a terrible effect on her and her daughter. She had two daughters by then. What happened next? Well, on the one hand, it's sort of slightly,

improved her status in that she inherited Pierre's professorship, but it also meant that she turned in on herself, she became very depressed. There was this very, very strong family unit with Marie Curie, Irene, who was, I think seven when her father died. Eve Curie wasn't even two years old, so Eve Curie was born into a fatherless family. And they moved to the outskirts of Paris, and Pierre's father was mainly responsible for bringing up the two girls. And they had a very intense, the three of them had a very, very intense relationship. Marie Curie was a very caring mother. She was very, very concerned about the children's education. She set up a special school with some of her friends so that they would be,

the children would be well educated. On the other hand, she was, it seems to me she was also away for long periods of time. And you can read some heart-rending letters like to Iran, saying, my darling, I love you so much, I would like nothing more in the whole world than to be with you on your birthday. Well, if she would like nothing, nothing. more in the whole world, why wasn't she there? And she... Just a person, would she be in the laboratory, because this is an obsessive element, isn't that? She would be in a

laboratory, quite often she would be at a conference, I mean, she would be travelling around doing other things. The girls spent a long time either with their father-in-law, their grandfather, her father-in-law, or else with governesses. And there's constant flow of letters between them, expressing

their love. And the girls are always saying, oh, I wish you were here. And then the letters for Maria checking up, have you done your homework? What did you have for supper? Have you done your exercises today? So she was very controlling and it was a very bonded family. But it was also it's rather like the double bind. I mean, she kept saying how much she loved them, but then she was never there. In this period, 1900, she's working intensively as a scientist. The word obsessive came up. Can you give listeners some idea of what that would mean? She'd won this Nobel Prize.

Was she coasting on this or was she diving into something else? She couldn't coast because there were too many unanswered questions. And so there were big scientific challenges for her. One was to measure the atomic weight of radium, for example. Radium was the one that had captured imagination, partly because of its possible medical uses. She also had to prepare something approaching pure radium, which was exceedingly difficult scientifically.

So she manages the atomic weight around about 1908. She managed to get something approaching pure radium by about 1910. But you have to realise what an enormously absorbing task this was. And I mean, I mentioned a moment ago, the sort of factory element, this world in which she moved. Many of her assistants were engineers. And they came out of that same school where Pierre Curie had been employed for many years. And they were products of that. that world, the engineering world, the practical world, a world that didn't bother about, you know,

mixing stuff in huge vats and that sort of thing. That was their milieu. So in that sense, she had a big scientific task, which she fulfilled, but it was something that demanded something approaching obsession. There is, you know, one of the biographies of Curie is entitled obsessive genius or something of that sort. And that really does convey sense. something. Then she hit a rock in, let's call it that, I've said it so we can't take it back, in 1911 when she came under fierce attack, she was

a controversial figure anyway in many ways, her secularism, her passionate sort of what we might now call left wing views, but she had an affair, she was a widow single woman in that sense, she had an affair with a professor who had four children and that seemed to light the blue newspaper. Yes, I mean, this was

1911, it was the same year that she won her second Nobel Prize. she did have an affair with Langevaire and various letters were leaked to the press and there was a suspicion that it was his wife that had leaked them. It was a very, very nasty affair but again, I think it was her... The reporting of the affair was not... The reporting of the affair

was, sorry, the whole affair, the situation was horrible in that she was really vilified in the press. I mean, we mentioned the Dreyfus affair. She was accused of being Jewish, she was accused of being a foreigner, she was accused of being a slot and a all the accusations were focused on her, yet actually it was him that who was married, and quite a lot of French, eminent French men did have mistresses outside their marriage.

It seems to me that almost all the criticism was focused on her rather than him, which seems very unfair. But it was something recognisable to us these days because it was press assaults, people at the door, pursuits, and a very, a thing finished in a very short time between them, but she felt wounded by it for a long time. She was wounded. The record suggests that she,

if we can believe all these letters, that she was in love with him. She was probably a very, very lonely woman. And she became very, very depressed for quite a long while after that. And one thing was she came to England for a while, she'd met a physicist called Herther Ayrton. And this was in 1903.

At a conference at the Royal Society, they were the two women physicists, and they were both married to men physicists, but these two women physicists were meant to go off with all the other wives. So these two women physicists became very, very close friends and supported each other. And she was very lonely. If you just look at the photographs of all the conferences, there's a sea of men, and she's there on her own.

So it's difficult to find allies in that sort of situation. Stephen Bramall briefly, it's extraordinary that you won a second Nobel Prize. Can you tell the listeners what you got it for? Yes, so rather interestingly, the way her first Nobel Prize had been worded, avoided talking about the discovery of polonium and radium. Now, it appears that the chemists on the Nobel Committee really wanted, were thinking in the long term,

of giving Mary the Chemistry Nobel Prize. Now, as Roberts already said, really to convince chemists in those days that you had a new element, you had to make the element itself. Mary achieved that in 1910 by an electrolyzing radium chloride, and that was enough for the chemists, and so she got the 1911 Nobel Prize for discovering the new elements,

polonium and radium and exploring their chemical properties, and she got it on her own, and this was a mark of the respect that chemists had for her. Just a little digression from Mary, before we come back to Robert Fox, it seems to be handed over to one of her daughters who also married a fellow scientist and also went on to win a Nobel Prize with her husband as Marie Curie's first Nobel Prize. You're talking about Iran? Yes.

I don't know. Are we going to say Iran? Irene. Patricia said Iran, so we'll stick with that. Yes. Yes, well, Iran was very close to her mother. What Patricia has said has really underlined that already, I think. And Iran went through all the French examinations, ending up with the doctorate in 1925. But between times, she'd worked with Maori very closely, particularly during the First World War, when after all, Iran was only in her late teens.

And she'd been very much involved in these mobile x-ray units, which were taken off to the military front. She'd been involved in training nurses back in Paris. So she'd worked very closely. And she almost inevitably, she was so close to her mother and so similar in temperament as well, very disdainful of appearances, illities socially. She really was a chip off the old block, I think, in many ways. And she worked closely with Mary and worked, of course, inevitably on radioactivity. Can we just go back to that First World War reference at Robert May Pressure?

because she, in the First World War, she got in a van and mobile laboratory and took it around the front and used her x-ray skill to help the wounded. Yes, and she also galvanised the government and the army into doing something, and by the time she'd finished, she was head of the Army Red Cross unit, radiology units, she had several ambulances and they went round the battlefield, and they were x-raying soldiers who'd got bullets inside them, and she must have saved hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of lives. And Iran came out to join her.

And I think the dynamics of the family is quite interesting. When Pierre married Marie, he said, he used a phrase, I want you to follow in the anti-natural path. So their lives were just 100% focused on science and each other. And then after he died, Iran, in some sense, took his place and became her scientific partner and collaborator in this anti-natural path. and the other daughter, Eve, was completely different in temperament. She was very musical. She was very pretty.

She liked nice clothes. She was artistic. And she became her mother's protector. So I think the dynamics of that family relationship are extremely interesting. And then when Iran got married to Frederick, she was bringing in one of Marie Curie's researchers, but she was bringing in this male element into this very strong unit of three women. Robert Posh. Can you tell me, you've talked about her obsessive work.

Did she have to work that hard to do what she did? Did it need that much effort to stir the pitchblen to get it out? Did it need 18 hours a day and non-stop? That sort of thing. There's a great physicality there. And I think probably it may be that the physicality has been exaggerated. It may be it was part of the Curie image building. That's possible, I suppose.

But you must realize that, first of all, pitch blend, despite being an ore, a sort of messy ore, it actually was very expensive. So she had to pay to have this stuff available to her. You know, as you said earlier, one ton of pitchblend ore to get 0.2 of a gram of radium. So that, she works, I think, certainly to raise money. She's very good at influencing people. She got money out of the government, out of the Academy of Sciences and so on. So I think it was a sort of industrial.

industrial enterprise, which demanded total engagement. But also being brought up a Catholic, it has something in common with the nature of a vocation, doesn't it really? Total dedication. She certainly had total dedication, but then so did Pierre, who was brought up in a totally different

way, but I see where you're going, well, I'm coming back now. What could be said that they gained from these but became very important, effective discoveries, the curers? What did Did they, any material gain come to them?

Well, they didn't really gain financially. And that's because they didn't want to. And that's because they didn't want to. They thought knowledge was for everybody. Absolutely. I mean, I think Mary said aradium is an element. It is owned by everybody, owned by the people. So they were quite principled or very principled in this regard.

I mean, of course, Mary gained by her contact, with the radium industry that at that point had become very big and she had very close relationship with it and got materials from there, for example. She also gained from her fame. So famously the women of America bought some radium for her. It was so expensive that only the Americans could produce it in big quantities and donated that for her scientific research. And so in a sense Mary never really gained in much at all in personal terms

but that's because she didn't want it but she gradually built a huge laboratory the Radium Institute in Paris and that's what she really wanted partly for her own vision and partly for the memory of her husband who famously was too much of a dreamer ever to have a laboratory

right so but all this time Patricia she's doing these experiments and it's having it as we we've learned, I've learned from you three, is having a terrible effect on her health. Well, she's giving herself cancer, really. One of the strange things, it seems to me,

she's constantly denied the hazard, and she would do things like putting a white laboratory smock on to protect herself, which of course is no good whatsoever. And she became successfully iller and iller, and she had terrible problems with her kidneys. She had a lot of surgery, and she became very, very weak. And when she went on a trip to America to raise funds, where she had to give a lot of public speeches

and by then she was only in her early 50s. She was visibly very, very fragile and the two daughters had to step in for her quite often. So, I mean, she was relatively young when she died. But the interesting thing for an outside like myself is knowing so much, she didn't seem to know that this was doing her harm.

She was probably in complete denial. We've already said she was an obsessive person. Perhaps it's like teenagers who have a belief in their own immortality. She just refused to recognise it. Robert Robert Roberts. Yes. Well, certainly I think she was in denial

And I think that became very apparent, particularly after the First World War. You asked earlier about the uses to which radium was put. Well, there was this assumption before the First World War that they might be medical uses, but that was rather vague. But certainly by the 1920s and 30s, there was a big radium industry. There were all sorts of quack medicines that you could buy,

which would have some sort of radioactive content. You could buy radioactive toothpaste. you could buy ointments to put on yourselves. And I think it wasn't entirely clear because radioactivity would have a different effect on different people. And I have a slight feeling that Mari was one of those people who was quite resistant. It got her in the end, that's true.

But she was quite resistant. But some of her assistants in the laboratory, for example, were getting ill very quickly and dying very quickly. And there is this refusal, her refusal, to acknowledge that fact. Stephen. was the same. Iran also died of cancer and she also similarly seemed to refuse to recognise it.

I mean, they were a tightly bonded couple. Of course, I think it was generally true in those days. People didn't really recognise the dangers of radiation. I mean, it wasn't really until the 1960s that really proper safety legislation started coming in on it and people started taking it very seriously.

But this was also true in chemistry labs, for example, in the 1920s and 30s, they used to boil a lot of mercury off and they used to get poisoned by that as well. So generally it wasn't as well understood and people took more risks in those days. Patricia Fine and sorry rather briefly, she achieved heroin status quite soon,

not quite soon, before she died, well before she died. I think she's, I'm afraid I think she's an appalling role model for women who want to go into science because the way she's been set up, she absolutely confirms that wrong notion that you can't be a normal woman and a good scientist and she confirms the stereotype. If you're a woman, you have to be really eccentric and strange,

and I dislike that. Fine. Thank you very much, Patricia. Very good ending. Thank you, Robert Fox and Steve Brownwell. Next week we'll be talking about the California Gold Rush in 1849. Thanks for listening. And the In Our Time podcast gets some extra time now with a few minutes of bonus material from Melvin and his guests.

Defensive, Mary. I'm talking about the way she's been represented. No, no, I understand. I can think of one very positive way in which Mary is represented today. So today the European Union funds what I call Mary Curie Fellowships. And these are for young people to go all over Europe like Mary did to go to the best labs and to follow their scientific careers and scientific dreams, women and men. And I think that's using Mary in her willingness to go abroad, to study.

to work hard as a good, as a positive real moment, isn't it? I think that's a very tenuous connection. I mean, how many of the people who go on a Maricuri Fellowship know that she travelled round, I mean, they might know she was Polish. Does it matter? You said it's a terrible role model for women.

They're equally men who did this sort of stuff, and they're not necessarily terrible role models for men. So what's the fuss? I mean, I think, I mean, there's a big, huge interest at the moment in why is it that young women aren't going into sciences, particularly that, particularly physics. And a lot of research shows that role models are extremely, extremely important. There have to be more women in the upper levels of science. And it gets down to things which might seem

trivial, but which aren't like having pictures of women in laboratories, having women's writings on the reading lists, all sorts of things like that. When Marie Curie went around America, a lot of the women there said, there's no way that I want to be a scientist. She's such a strange woman and she's so ridiculously clever. I can't even begin to aspire to that. And also importantly, I think they didn't want to. They didn't want to be someone who starved themselves to death and who, I mean, you know, who fainted from hunger. That's part of the romance. And who also, I mean, she, in a sense, sacrificed her children. That's the theme of Eve's biography is that Pierre and Marie had three children. They had Iran, Eve, and Radium. And they

paid easily as much attention to Radium as they did to their human children. I think Eve has a lot to answer for. Oh, I think she's a marvellous woman. Yeah, well, she may be marvellous and has her virtues, but I think she has a lot to answer for in building the Marie Curie in me. Absolutely, because of that

biography. Because of the biography which came out in the 1930s, which gave rise in turn to the film Madame Curie in 1943. They wanted to have Greta Garbo. Can you imagine Greta Garber? Yes, I'm in everything. Yes, it would have been maybe slightly but you know, it got lots of Oscar nominations.

Absolutely, yes. So why did that, why... Can you want to follow that through, Robert? Why do you think she... She said to cat among the pigeons or whatever praise you use? Well, she created a particular image of Marie Curie as an exceptional person. I think that that's what comes across to me. Well, she was in a way, but if you're trying to encourage,

particularly if you're going down the track that Patricia was talking about, you're trying to encourage girls to go into science. You want to show that there's something that's a bit normal about this whole activity. But what if there is it? There'd be very few great scientists are normal people. But she spent her whole life being excluded from the family. Her parents, her sister, her brother-in-law, they all had Nobel Prizes for Science. And all through her upbringing, it was Iran and Marie together.

And oh, there's Eve who's pretty... she likes music, what on earth are we going to do with her? Well, my reading of the history, I actually have to say Patricia is very different. I mean, I think Mary's amazing in that she was a normal person, you know, she had a family, she was a loving mother as we've heard she did other things, and she

was a great scientist. I'm not talking about the actuality, I'm talking about the way she's presented. She's always presented as being on her own as undertaking this sort of vast siving operation, which is rather analogous to being in the kitchen. She always looks grim and solitary. Oh, she's

Sure, that's the way. I mean, that's what I'm talking about. It's the way she's represented, not actually how she was. Yes, but I think if you dig down, you just discover she was an extremely good scientist. I think you have to bear in mind that her reputation has evolved enormously. And a turning point, certainly for French people of today, was the arrival of her remains in the Pontian in Paris, you know, the temple of the great men, as it's called, in 1995.

And I think her reputation in France has risen enormously in the last 20 years. And I think they've been able to get rid of a bit of this baggage of her, the clothes she wore and her obsessive character. Whereas here, she's known for the Marie Curie nurses. Exactly so. And I think there's a very special French perception of Marie Curie. And of course, you go back further in time and you've got to realize that she was a very controversial person in France. because they knew about the poor La Javan affair. They knew about her strange characteristics and so on,

in a way that the British didn't. Producer Simon Tillotson. Tea, coffee. There are many more Radio 4 arts and discussion programmes to download for free. Find these on the website at BBC.com.com.com. Slash Radio 4.