Short History Of... - Marie Curie

Episode Date: October 20, 2024

Marie Curie was an extraordinary woman who, alongside her husband Pierre, turned the scientific world on its head. Their work led to the discovery of new elements, and a previously unknown process, called radioactivity. Over the course of a 40-year career, Marie Curie faced daunting challenges - from personal choices, to devastating health issues. But how did one woman make the journey from struggling immigrant to internationally recognised scientist? How important was her partnership with her husband? And what is the legacy of the research she began in a disused storeroom over a century ago. This is a Short History Of Marie Curie. A Noiser Production. Written by Kate Harrison. With thanks to Susan Quinn, biographer and author of Marie Curie: A Life. Get every episode of Short History Of a week early with Noiser+. You’ll also get ad-free listening, bonus material, and early access to shows across the Noiser network. Click the Noiser+ banner to get started. Or, if you’re on Spotify or Android, go to noisier.com/subscriptions. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

It's the 1st of November, 1914, and in northern France, a small van is making its way along icy country roads. The two men and two women inside left Paris hours ago, but this is no day trip. Sitting in the front, next to the driver, is 47-year-old Marie Curie. Next to the driver is 47-year-old Marie Curie. In peacetime, she is at the cutting edge of physics and chemistry research, work that has won her two Nobel Prizes. But now France is at war, and Madame Curie has a radical plan that could save lives.

And she hopes today's trip will persuade skeptical military commanders that she is right. They pass army vehicles as they head towards the front line. Just a few months into World War I, thousands of wounded French troops are being evacuated to field hospitals after the disastrous Battle of the Marne. Finally, they stop outside the evacuation hospital. The car is modest, paid for by the French Red Cross, but it's packed with medical materials and a generator capable of supplying electricity in under-resourced emergency stations. A young woman steps out of the rear door.

Irene Curie is Marie's daughter, just turned 17. She heads into the hospital to find the medics in charge, while her mother goes around to the back of the vehicle with the engineer and the driver to set up the equipment. The power supply is rigged up and a table folded out. A primitive X-ray machine is set up inside. Marie closes blackout curtains at the windows to block light from the outside. It needs to be as dark as possible to create the images. Irene returns with some doctors and the first of the wounded soldiers. Some on stretchers, others walking with crutches.

Marie hides her shock as these young men line up, their bodies ravaged by battle. The first patient winces as he climbs inside the van and lies down on the table so his shattered arm and shoulder can be examined. Irene and the engineer position the equipment, then start the machine. It sends a high-voltage current through glass vacuum tubes, producing X-rays which are beamed at the soldier's body. By looking through a fluorescent screen which reacts to the x-rays, doctors can see the internal damage they've got to deal with. Marie has taught herself anatomy, so she can explain to the doctors what they're seeing. She points towards the image. This boy, barely 18, has a simple fracture of the arm.

It should heal with little intervention and certainly doesn't need amputation. He is helped back up and two orderlies bring an older soldier in the unit on a stretcher. He groans as he is heaved onto the table. Both his legs have been shattered by blast injuries, but the doctors want to try to save them. Yeren holds the man's hand as he is x-rayed. But this time, as the images appear, Marie shakes her head. She points out pieces of shrapnel, the metal showing up white on the image, alongside the man's multiple fractures. The plates may help surgeons to locate the shrapnel, but in these days before antibiotics,

they all know that amputation is probably the safest option to avoid catastrophic infection. Marie and her team work for several hours before the last soldier has been examined and the secrets hidden inside their damaged bodies have been revealed. All the doctors are impressed, but one, the most skeptical among his colleagues, approaches Marie as she helps pack up the equipment.

"'This works,' he tells her. I will tell my colleagues what difference it makes. By the end of the year, 18 of these vehicles, which became known as Petit Curies, would be in operation. It was the latest extraordinary twist in the life of a woman whose work turned the scientific world on its head. Alongside her husband, Pierre, she discovered new elements and a previously unknown process which she named radioactivity.

Over the course of a 40-year career, she faced daunting challenges. While her work was praised, she was often hounded for her personal choices. And the very discoveries that defined her career had a devastating effect on her health. So how did Marie Curie make the journey from struggling immigrant to internationally recognized scientist? How important was her partnership with her husband? And what is the legacy of the research she began in a disused storeroom over a century ago?

I'm John Hopkins from the Noisa Network. This is a short history as Marie Curie is born on November 7, 1867, in Warsaw, Poland. Named Maria Skłodowska, she is the youngest of five children. Her parents are both highly regarded teachers, committed to ensuring their children are well educated and raised to understand their heritage. But growing up under Russian occupation, learning about her native culture, history and language is considered subversive. Susan Quinn is a biographer and the author of Marie Curie, A Life. and the author of Marie Curie, A Life.

She grew up surrounded in an atmosphere of resistance, really. Her parents were passionate about the Polish language, Polish history, all of which the Russians were trying very hard to suppress. Her mother was a school teacher, a head of a private school for girls, where there were two curricula. One was the one for the day the Russian inspectors came to school and everything had to be in Russian and the rest of the time the courses were taught in Polish. So all of the children were kind of part of this conspiracy against the Russian suppression of Polish culture. of this conspiracy against the Russian suppression of Polish culture.

And when the Russians ban practical science from Polish classrooms, Maria's father, who teaches maths and physics, smuggles lab equipment home. There, he teaches his children to perform experiments. And from an early age, Maria shows a precocious talent. But her childhood is also marked by tragedy. When she is seven, her older sister Zofia dies of typhus, caught from a lodger her father had taken to make ends meet. And three years later, her beloved mother dies of tuberculosis. She was deeply affected by it. Some in the family thought she was more

deeply affected than any of the children, but the boys and girls all were very good students. Her brother became a doctor, the girls had a more difficult time because there was no higher education for them in Poland. no higher education for them in Poland. Maria's formal education finishes when she's 15 years old. But she and her elder sister Bronia keep learning, thanks to an underground organization. The Flying University is an informal network which brings together leading Polish academics

who teach mostly female students in secret classes. These are held in ever-changing locations to keep the institution's very existence hidden from the Russians. Over 5,000 young Poles will benefit from this clandestine group. But the university can't offer any formal qualifications. any formal qualifications. So, realizing they can go no further in Poland, these Godowska sisters make a pact to help each other continue their education no matter what.

Her older sister, Bronia, managed to go to Paris to study medicine and get a degree in medicine. Married a doctor who was himself a Polish radical who couldn't even go back to Russian Poland because he was already considered a criminal. Meanwhile, Maria, the youngest and the brightest, everyone in the family acknowledged the brightest of all the children, spent those years working as a governess out in the countryside in a kind of modest estate where she taught the children

and wound up falling in love with the son of the family and having a very painful rejection because she was not worthy, not of the class of the son. But in 1891, it's finally time for Brogna to fulfill her side of the pact. Maria, now aged 24, moves to Paris to study at the prestigious Sorbonne University. One of only 210 women out of 9,000 students. To begin with, she lives with her sister, but it's too noisy, so she rents a tiny garret room on the sixth floor of an apartment building to devote herself to study. The rooms are unheated, so she layers on all her clothes to keep warm, and often can't afford to eat.

In France, Maria now uses the name Marie, and comes first in her class when she graduates in physics, before earning a second degree in maths in 1894. She begins working in an industrial laboratory, where she conducts research on the magnetic properties of steel. But her ultimate plan is always to return home. She was lonely and guilty about her father, whom she'd left behind, who longed for her to come back. And she always planned to come back. Her commitment was to Poland.

She, like everyone in the family, was passionate about serving her country and the Polish cause, and she planned to go back. In the meantime, she looks for more lab space to continue her work. And that search will pave the way for a partnership that will change her life and the field of physics forever. It's a Polish physicist who introduces Maria Skodowska to a 34-year-old physics instructor called Pierre Curie. The mutual friend hopes Pierre will be able to help her access the labs where he teaches. But from their very first meeting over dinner in the spring of 1894, it's apparent that there's something special between the two. She describes looking at him, looking, he's standing at a window and she saw him in silhouette and she saw how beautiful his hands were.

You know, it's pretty clear that they really fell hard for each other. There was a lot of back and forth and she was ambivalent for a while because she had this loyalty to Poland. But in the end, she wrote her friend Tazia back in Poland that they had to live together. They had to be together.

There was no alternative. The intellectual connection between Marie and Pierre quickly deepens, though they have very different backgrounds. Though his father is a doctor, Pierre's approach to science is anything but conventional. His father was really a radical. Pierre Curie and his brother Jacques had been homeschooled by this father and had experienced a rare kind of freedom as boys. They could spend days out in nature doing research of sorts, collecting samples and studying them with the encouragement of the father. So he had this very unusual background,

and he was in some way a sort of a pure person who really despised all the pomp and circumstance of French science at the time. And there was a lot of it, a lot of pretension, you know, the academy and so on. And he scorned all that. In 1895, after a year of working closely together, Pierre proposes. The two marry in July 1895 in a low-key civil ceremony on the outskirts of Paris.

Instead of a wedding dress, Marie wears a navy suit, which she will later wear in the laboratory. She'll often be pictured in the outfit when their future work together wins them accolades. But for now, they focus on a simple life, asking for bicycles as wedding gifts and traveling to Brittany on their honeymoon. gifts and traveling to Brittany on their honeymoon. Right from the start, science comes before home comforts. They establish a small laboratory in a storeroom at the university where Pierre works, where they will conduct much of their groundbreaking research. Their marriage is a meeting of equals.

It was a powerful partnership. In the beginning, they weren't working actually on the same project, but that evolved. He and his brother, who was also a scientist, Jacques, were working on crystals and the mysteries of crystals and crystallography. And they were also very good inventors, really. And they were also very good inventors, really. They invented a number of delicate instruments, one of which was called the quartz pizzeria. And it was a way of measuring very, very small differences in weight. And that wound up being absolutely essential to the work that evolved.

In 1897, Marie gives birth to their first child, Irène. When Pierre's mother dies, his father moves in with the family and helps raise his new granddaughter. Marie takes a scientific interest in her child, recording Irène's first words and weight progress. The new mother also takes teaching work to support the family, but somehow the Curies find time to continue their scientific enterprises. European researchers have already been making significant strides in the worlds of physics and chemistry. A few years back, German engineer Wilhelm Röntgen discovered X-rays, a still unexplained

form of electromagnetic radiation that can be captured on photographic film. An experiment on the scientist's wife leaves a ghostly image of her bones behind. And the following year, French physicist Henri Beckeroult finds that uranium salts emit their own rays spontaneously those two discoveries interest marie though she knows how hard it might be for a woman to make an impact in established scientific fields she is determined to measure this new property to measure this new property. She uses Pierre's electrometer on different samples, including pitchblende, a black mineral extracted

during silver mining, which is known to have seams of uranium running through it. Marie Curie was experimenting with a whole lot of different substances and finding, especially in pitchblende, that it was producing some kind of energy that caused it to lose small amounts of weight. So the question was, what was going on? What was happening? And it was emitting rays. So then the next question was, how did we find out what in the pitch blend is doing this? And that started to be a very physical job of reducing the substance to its parts

and trying to discover what was the element within it that was producing this radiation. It is February the 18th, 1888, and in central Paris, 29-year-old Marie Curie unlocks an icy laboratory. The converted dissection room is little more than a shed and sparsely equipped. She closes the door behind her, shutting out the sounds of the students chatting outside. She needs to focus completely. As she sets up her equipment, the air turns white where she breathes. The weather is worsening outside, but it'll take more than that to keep her from her work. She's been inspired by the discovery of mysterious energetic rays emanating from the metal uranium. She doesn't understand what they are. No one does. But yesterday,

she made a discovery she can't quite explain. So today she's repeating the experiment. Carefully, she takes a small nugget of red-black pitch blend from a wooden box and weighs it, noting the figure in her book. Then she places the mineral in a compression chamber, built from grocery crates, which will fire an electrical charge at the sample. Walking to the other end of the long bench, she checks the motor that makes a mirror spin when electrical charges are present. That projects a tiny beam of light onto a ruler suspended at the other end. Marie sits down, close to the ruler.

To an outsider, it's a baffling setup. But by monitoring tiny changes, it allows Marie to measure the waves of energy produced by the pitch blend. She holds a stopwatch in one hand and clicks it at the exact moment she starts the experiment. The projected light dances on the ruler, showing how much charge the sample is giving off. The exact moment the beam stops moving, she stops the watch again, then races to her lab journal. It's the same result. She is now certain that this pitch blend is producing a current far stronger than pure uranium.

Two, three, four times as powerful. The door opens, bringing a blast of icy air. Pierre enters the lab and she beckons him over, excitedly rifling through the pages of the journal. The results for Pitchblende prove uranium isn't the only element to give off this strange energy. It must contain different, unidentified material. Meaning that in this humble space, they might have uncovered a brand new element.

And taken a step towards understanding more about the atoms that are the building blocks for everything that exists. Within months, Marie and Pierre will have isolated this mystery element to a purity 300 times more active than uranium. And they will name it Polonium, after Marie's much loved home country of Poland. They prepare a paper about this newly discovered process of energy release, which Marie calls radioactivity. But they face a barrier in spreading the word to other scientists. Neither Pierre nor Marie, especially not Marie, were members of the Academy of Science, so they couldn't present their work themselves.

They had to ask Henri Becquerel to present it for them. Just a few months later, in December 1898, they discover and name another element, radium. radium. Also found in pitchblende, radium is even more radioactive than polonium, and its discovery further cements their place in the scientific community. That was the beginning

of really a new understanding of the atom and of the structure of matter. So this was the beginning of really world-shaking change in the way matter was understood. The Curies meticulously developed methods

to isolate radium from pitchblende, an exhausting procedure that involves processing tons of the material to extract just a tiny amount of the element. They secure a larger shed, where they work through enormous quantities of leftover pitchblende using noxious chemicals. It's already known that the gases this produces are toxic, so they keep the windows open even during freezing winters.

But at this stage, no one suspects that radioactivity itself can be dangerous, even though Marie and Pierre suffer burns to their fingers where they've handled radium. It took three years to isolate radium, and then it took quite a few more years to really understand the nature of atomic and nuclear structure. But this discovery was the key to opening that door. And really all of modern science evolved out of that. Their work on radioactivity is revolutionary. Through their research, they show this process is a property of atoms themselves,

not just a chemical reaction as previously thought. This concept changes how scientists see atomic structure. The discovery of radium, in particular, has potential for medicine, especially in the fight against cancer. The discovery of radium was just a clue to the much more profound and important discovery, which was radioactivity, which then led to the understanding of the structure of the atom and the nucleus. And so it took a while for this to become clear, but it was important enough for them to be awarded, along with Henri Becquerel, the Nobel Prize in 1903. In fact, at first, Marie is not nominated at all.

The Nobel Committee proposed that Pierre will share the prize with Henri Becquerel. But despite Marie leading much of the research, she's not due to be recognized herself. There was one Swedish scientist who pointed out that Marie Curie should maybe be included, but the rest didn't think that necessary. But then Pierre wrote a wonderful letter to the committee saying, would it be better for artistic reasons,

he said, for the Nobel Prize to be awarded to Marie Curie and me? So in the end, it was awarded to them both. She becomes the first woman to be awarded, but the Curies don't go to Stockholm to collect the prize immediately. Pierre is unwell, and they can't spare the time. But they can't control the impact the award has

on their status and their everyday lives. The Curies are hitting the headlines. It changed their life forever. They became famous. And the newspapers just love this romantic story, you know, love in a laboratory. You know, these two as a romantic couple were plastered all over the pages of French newspapers. French newspapers at the time were quite sensational. A fact that would come back to haunt Marie Curie later in life.

When Pierre does finally go to accept the award, he takes great care to credit his wife for many of the most significant strides. But there is another reason his speech is quoted to this day. He talked about, first of all, dynamite, which is what Nobel himself discovered. first of all, dynamite, which is what Nobel himself discovered. And its potential for both making progress and also being harmful to the world. And he wondered if these new discoveries might have the potential to be both a great step forward and also a source of danger and harm. step forward and also a source of danger and harm. That was a prophetic statement on Pierre Curie's part about the future of the atom

and all that resulted from that discovery. The accolade does mean that life becomes easier for the Curies in financial terms. Their share of the prize money amounts to around 9,000 US dollars, the equivalent of almost 300,000 US dollars today. They choose to use some of the money to hire a lab assistant to help them, and the prestige also leads to Pierre finally being offered a professorship. In 1904, their second daughter, Eve, is born.

The family take holidays on the French coast and in the countryside, and Pierre visits Marie's relatives in Poland, making the effort to learn a few words of her native language. There was a lot of pleasure in the children, and Pierre was a very involved father. He wrote charmingly about what kind of underwear and t-shirts they would need for the new baby and so on. He was quite a gentle, loving husband. But Pierre is already suffering with severe joint pains and fatigue. At 45, he's a decade

older than his wife, but there seems to be no obvious medical cause. but there seems to be no obvious medical cause. Both of them were worried about Pierre's health because his hands were so damaged by his handling these radioactive materials. It was difficult for him to work. He was having pain in his legs and his back, and Marie was very worried about him. However, the Curies could not have known the dangers of prolonged exposure to radioactive substances. They often handle the materials without protective equipment,

keeping vials of radium in their pockets and desks, fascinated by its glowing properties. One weekend in April 1906, the Curies take a trip to the countryside to enjoy the spring sunshine. By the time they return, rain is soaking Paris. Pierre heads out for a meeting alone, and on the way back, he's crossing a busy junction when he is hit by a horse-drawn wagon. His skull is crushed under its wheels, and he dies instantly. His death leaves Marie devastated. She has lost not only her husband, but also her closest collaborator and intellectual partner. Irene is only eight years old, and little Ev is just a year and a half.

Curie retreats into herself, writing long passages to her lost husband in a diary. It was just so devastating for Marie. She wrote wonderfully, and that was one of my discoveries in the Bibliotheque Nationale, with the letters that she wrote to Pierre after he died. In her journal, she wrote to him as though he were alive. And she wrote about having some flowers that they'd brought back from the country on the table in the lab.

And she wrote, you know, these flowers are still alive and you are not. She went into a really profound depression for a number of years. It really took quite a while for her to recover from it. But continuing their work offers some solace. She is given the physics chair that had been created for her husband at the university and hopes this will allow her to establish the laboratory they had both dreamed of. As the very first female professor at the Sorbonne, she delivers her inaugural lecture to a packed hall in November 1906,

six months after Pierre's death. That created a sensation. There were newspaper articles all about this amazing fact that this woman was teaching at the Sorbonne and fashionable people came. There are newspapers describing the hats that the women wore when they sat in the balcony to hear Marie Curie teach. Curie continues her work while her father-in-law cares for his two granddaughters, doing his best to inject a little fun into the mournful household. But progress on the lab Pierre had been promised is slow. The scientific institutions in France resist offering his widow the kudos

or positions that a male professor might expect. Even after winning a Nobel Prize, she's rejected by the French Academy. They would go on to describe that she might be flirting or wearing seductive dress or, you know, in some ways just disrupting the scientific enterprise if they allowed her to be a member. But much worse is to come. In 1911, she faces an intense and very public crisis over her relationship with Pierre Curie's closest friend, Paul Langevin.

A fellow physicist, his own marriage is deeply unhappy, and he confides in Marie, who is still grieving her husband. Letters they send to each other are stolen and leaked by Langevin's wife to the sensationalist French newspapers. Curie becomes headline news again, but this time the publicity is far from positive. Her life became really unbearable. She was being hounded by people. She could barely leave her house. There were people surrounding her house throwing stones. There were endless articles about her. And the focus of the articles was that she was a foreign woman

who had destroyed a French household, a foyer français, which was a sacred idea of the French household. So that was devastating. A duel is even arranged between her lover and one of the many journalists who write about the case, though it ends without a shot being fired. In the middle of the scandal, she receives a letter from Stockholm

telling her she's been awarded the Nobel Prize for Chemistry for her work isolating and purifying radium. The accolade makes her the first person in history to be awarded the prize in two distinct fields, an honor she alone holds to this day. But her satisfaction is short-lived. The chair of the Nobel Committee tries to persuade her she should not visit Sweden to collect her prize because of the gossip. He even implies that had they known all the details of the affair, she would not have been awarded the prize at all. She herself, in a moment of great courage, wrote back and said, I had always believed that the Nobel Prize was being given for my scientific work and that my private life had nothing to do with it. And she went and received

the Nobel Prize. This was 1911 in chemistry. She gave a speech, which is really remarkable for the number of times she uses I. I did this, I did that, and so on. Because the assumption of the general society had been that Pierre was the brains behind the thing. And the discovery was really more his than hers. So this second Nobel speech was an affirmation of her own agency in the discoveries. The fight has a profound effect on her physical and mental health. She takes a break for over a year, needing an operation on her kidney. She then stays with a friend and suffrage campaign in England while she recovers from surgery and depression brought on by the scandal.

Many people stand up for her, including Albert Einstein, but the entire episode highlights the double standards of the era. French men had mistresses. It was almost a requirement, you know. I mean, it was sort of expected, or at least it was not a big deal. So the big deal was not that. The big deal was that she was not an anonymous woman. She wasn't like other French women. She wasn't like women generally, you know, she had ambitions. She had a sense of herself as a person of substance. And that was the threat, much more than anything else. And of course, her foreignness then added another dimension.

We know about that kind of prejudice against immigrants. The affair with Langevin ends, but the two remain close friends. After her absence, Curie returns, determined to focus again on the plans she'd made with Pierre for a dedicated lab. And in 1914, she's appointed director of the Curie Laboratory at the newly built Radium Institute in Paris. But it's world events that will shape the next stage in her pioneering scientific journey and change her public image yet again. When World War I begins, the threat of German invasion means Marie Curie's Radium Institute in Paris must be closed down.

She travels to the new seat of government in the south in Bordeaux with her precious refined radium. It will stay there for safekeeping during the war. The threat to her adopted nation makes her determined to do what she can to help, despite the harsh treatment it has often afforded her. Though her attempt to cash in her Nobel medals to raise funds for the war effort is refused, she invests her prize money in war bonds instead. And the idea for the mobile X-ray units will change the minds of many who condemned her. They were a way of saying, I am French. She was Polish too, but she saw herself as French, she saw her daughters as French,

and she wanted the respect of the nation. And so what she did was remarkable and so original, really did make her a hero. After initial experiments, Curie gets an official sanction of sorts, although it is grudging. She raises funds for 18 cars and over 200 permanent X-ray posts. She also helps train 150 female radiologists from all backgrounds to work at the stations. She and Irene personally X-ray 1,200 wounded soldiers. In total, over a million Allied servicemen will benefit. After the conflict ends in 1918, she returns to her research, recruiting scientists from all over

Europe to the Radium Institute, including many women. Among them is her daughter Irene, who, alongside her husband, is developing her own theories and experiments. But Marie Curie is the woman the world associates with developments in radioactivity. During their pioneering early work, she and Pierre resisted patenting their method of extracting radium, but now demand for the substance is enormous. With the dangers of radioactivity still unknown, radium is used in watches, skin creams, toothpaste, and many other products. It's also increasingly utilized in medical spheres. She continued to be identified with the elements themselves and with radium,

and it was beginning then of discovery of radium's possibilities, actually for treatment of cancer. But the Institute is now a victim of its own success, with the element increasingly expensive and hard to get hold of. By 1920, a single gram costs over 100,000 US dollars, over a million dollars in today's terms. It's prominent American journalist Missy Maloney who makes it her own personal mission to raise funds to get the supplies Curie needs. She writes an inspiring, if overblown, article portraying Madame Curie as a soft-hearted,

devoted mother fighting to cure cancer. Missy Maloney, who was just a tremendously energetic woman who idolized Marie Curie, and she organized these trips to the United States and presenting this public version of Marie Curie. Marie Curie really didn't like doing that. She hated publicity and she hated all of this attention, but she liked the fact that radium was going to be useful.

She didn't understand, nobody really understood, that it could also be very damaging. Of course, Pierre Curie had been prophetic in that regard. And while the French government is still paying little attention to Curie, American women, newly granted the vote, take this female scientist to their hearts. The fund grows and grows. It's the 3rd of May, 1921, and 23-year-old Irene Curie stares out of the window of a limousine as it travels along a tree-lined driveway in Washington, D.C. The sun shines on the bright green north lawn as the famous building ahead comes into focus. The White House is smaller than she expected, but still, she is nervous as they get closer.

She takes a compact mirror from her bag, checks her hair and hands it to her mother who does the same. A small crowd of people is waiting when the car pulls up. Irene is the first to step down, followed by her sister Ev and finally by the woman they're waiting for, Marie Curie. Irene helps her mother down from the car, grasping her left hand. Her right is in a sling after it was injured by, of all things, an overly firm handshake from an American businessman.

She's only 52, but her face is grey. It seems she's ageing fast. But her face is grey. It seems she's ageing fast. The three women walk slowly up the steps into this legendary building. As with everything else in the United States, it seems to glow, unlike war-damaged Europe. The little delegation is ushered into the East Room. It reminds Irene of a French palace,

with its enormous chandeliers and huge windows swathed in velvet drapes. The room is already full of people, 100 or more. Irene recognizes some of them, fellow scientists from Poland and France. One woman races over to them, gloved hands flapping. Missy Maloney, in a wild feathered hat. She greets the Curies with her usual excitement, as tiny as Marie, but bursting with energy. Irene's mother smiles at the journalist. Even though she hates the attention, she admires Missy for her drive. And now the room falls silent as President Harding walks in, tall, with dark eyebrows and pure white hair. He gives a speech about Madame Curie's achievements, before inviting her up on

stage with him for a very special presentation. Irene and Eve walk with their mother towards the podium where the president unrolls an enormous scroll. It's a deed of ownership for a quantity of radium, a gift from the American people. Now a besuited man wheels in a trolley carrying a casket. The president explains it weighs 130 pounds because of the lead lining to stop radiation leaking from the valuable radium contained inside. He presents Madame Curie with a golden key. Irene notices the relief on her mother's face as the long ceremony ends. As they leave, she almost trips up, as though she didn't see the edge of a precious rug.

Surely her eyes aren't going too. A little more carefully, they head outside for a photo call, but Marie looks tired as she poses with the President. He gestures for her to take his arm, and she makes the effort to smile for the cameras. Irene is relieved that her mother has made it through the presentation. But she's more worried than ever about the future. In fact, there is no radium inside the fancy casket. It's too valuable and dangerous to be brought to the White House. Instead, it's locked away in a lab for safekeeping until Marie Curie returns to France.

For the rest of the trip, her daughters take her place at official receptions, though she enjoys a visit to the Grand Canyon. And the radium will help her continue her breakthroughs. She rewrites her will to ensure it's left to her daughters to carry on the work. But despite her efforts to disguise it, it's clear her health is declining. She develops cataracts, which need surgery, and other symptoms of what we now recognize as radiation poisoning. For two decades, the risks of radioactivity have been unknown by scientists. Then, devastating health issues start affecting workers who apply

glow-in-the-dark paint to watch dials. Alarm grows about the effects radium might have on anyone exposed to this unstable material. It became clear that the women who were doing that work in these factories, producing these watches, were having severe cancers of the jaw and the mouth because they were licking the brushes that they used. cancers of the jaw and the mouth because they were licking the brushes that they used. That was the beginning of a clue to the double-edged sword of radioactivity and of radioactive elements. But even though, as a scientist, she must suspect that radiation has damaged her health, Curie is determined not to admit it to herself or others. Marie stays busy, writing her husband's biography and helping to establish a new radium institute

in her beloved Warsaw. She is appointed to the International Atomic Weights Committee and other key organizations, and she promotes the work of her many protégés, including her daughter, who works with her husband in the Radium Institute. In January 1934, the couple produce artificial radioactivity for the first time. radioactivity for the first time. The news goes out around the lab and Marie Curie hears that this is happening and that there's an experiment in the basement

where Frederick and Irin are demonstrating their discovery. And the door flies open and there is Marie Curie and Paul Langevin together walk into the room and witness this moment. And she holds a Geiger counter up to the experiment to see that there is this radioactive emission caused by this artificial version of the process. So Irene was a very important part of her legacy. was a very important part of her legacy. In fact, Irene and her husband are awarded the Nobel Prize for Chemistry for their work.

But it's a bittersweet moment because Marie doesn't quite live to see it. Madame Curie dies on July 4, 1934, in a sanatorium at 66 years old. Her cause of death is aplastic anemia, a blood disorder which she almost certainly developed because of radiation exposure. However, it's likely that her work with primitive X-ray equipment during the war caused much more damage than her research.

She is buried next to her husband in his home village, 28 long years after his death. But later the couple are reinterred at the Pantheon in Paris, reserved for great French figures. As the first woman to be laid to rest there on the basis of her personal achievements, even in death Marie Curie is a pioneer. The remains are kept in a lead-lined tomb because of the risks of radioactivity. Some of Marie's lab documents and personal possessions, even her cookbooks, are only available to researchers under carefully monitored conditions because they may still be dangerous. When I worked at the Biblioteca Nacional, I was asked to sign a release before I could handle the papers.

I think that was kind of a necessary but very dramatic gesture. But there were parts of the lab where I visited and worked that the director at the time said, well, there's one little bathroom in one corner, but she said, you don't want to go in there. So there was still perhaps some radioactivity lurking around in the lab. 90 years after Mary Curie's death, her name is well known by schoolchildren and scientists alike. Her life has been reinterpreted in film and books, and her discoveries and determination

are marked by museums and statues in France and her birthplace in Warsaw. Her younger daughter, Eve, became a journalist and wrote a best-selling biography of her mother as well as working as a humanitarian in World War II. Marie Curie's contribution to medical science also lives on in charities and treatment centers taking her name. But as well as the global significance, her life is also inspiring to female scientists

and those forced to seek refuge elsewhere to pursue their dreams and potential. She would want to be awarded and remembered for her work, her discoveries, certainly not her private life. She tended at times to be portrayed as a kind of automaton, you know, out there stirring her mix of pitch blend and a big pot like a witch, you know, trying to isolate her radium, sort of single-minded and somehow not a full woman. She was a woman in so many ways. It's helpful for all of us to understand how human she was, how deeply caring she was in her personal life.

That might not be the legacy she would choose to highlight, but I think it's one that's important for all of us to understand as we women in particular attempt to have lives away from home and lives of love and caring at home. And she did both those things. Next time on Short History, I will bring you a short history of the Trojan War. Well, it doesn't have to be unduly romantic to suppose that the Trojan War did happen, that there was a raiding party from the mainland that destroyed the citadel that we now know as Troy. Memory of that was no doubt turned into some of these heroic lays that would have been transmitted orally for centuries until they were written down.

Some scholars will be cautious. I'm quite prepared to believe there was a Trojan War, more or less, as Homer remembers it. But of course, he tells it as a fantastic tale of love, betrayal, happiness, sadness, and life and death. That's next time. If you can't wait a week until the next episode, you can listen to it right away by subscribing to Noiser Plus. Head to www.noiser.com forward slash subscriptions for more information.