Jordan Campbell

A few weeks ago, posters appeared on campus with a picture of Marie Curie and an atomic bomb entitled “The Truth.” The text below the poster stated that, “The brightest Woman this Earth ever created was Marie Curie, The Mother of the Nuclear Bomb. You tell me if the plan of Women leading Men is still a good idea!” There has been much debate over the posters and if they classify as hate speech, but throughout the entire ordeal, I have yet to see anyone discuss the claim made by the perpetrator.
I think the poster provides a great opportunity to discuss Marie Curie’s placement in the history of science and her accomplishments. She is one of the four people to have won two Nobel Prizes (chemistry and physics) and the only female to do so. Additionally, she is one of only two females to win the Nobel Prize in physics (the other being Goeppert-Mayer) and one of four females to win the Nobel Prize in chemistry, another winner being her daughter, Irene. She was one of the few females who was able to break through the male-dominated field of physics at the turn of the century and make fundamental discoveries. Her accomplishments are impressive: discovering two new elements, polonium and radium; coining and working extensively on radiation; as well as instigating the first investigations into using radioactivity as a cancer treatment.

The path towards a career in physics was not easy for Marie. Born Maria Sklodowska, she grew up in a well-off Polish family, with her father being a teacher of physics and mathematics, and her mother running a boarding school for girls. Her father invested the family money into a failed business venture and, due to Russian oppression, resulted in the Curies living in a state of poverty. Her mother died when Marie was 12, which resulted in Marie becoming very depressed.
Unlike her siblings, Marie did not pursue a career in academia, and instead chose to become a governess for a wealthy lawyer. She had an affair with the son, Kazimierz Zorawski, and there was a plan to get married, however the marriage was opposed by his parents due to the difference in class. The denial of marriage greatly affected both of them and it is said that even as an old man, Zorawski would regularly sit in front of a statue of Curie at the Curie Institute in Warsaw.
While a governess, she joined an underground university (conventional universities did not accept women) and furthered her own education by reading extensively, with a focus on science. As the marriage was not going to happen, Marie was soon fired from her job. She accepted an offer from her sister to live in Paris.
It was here in Paris that Marie started her career in physics. She studied at the University of Paris, where she would eventually become the first female professor. She was at a great disadvantage due to her limited mathematical background and a loose grasp on the French language. She persevered, and was able to graduate with high honours in physics and in mathematics. It was near the end her education that she met her future husband, Pierre, who ran the laboratory at another Paris college. They quickly fell in love; however, Marie was still hoping that she could return to her native Warsaw and continue her studies. This dream was cut short when she was denied a position at the university in Warsaw because she was female.
Marie remained in Paris and married Pierre in late 1895. The two were inseparable after marriage. They effectively lived in their laboratory and rarely ventured outside, except for the occasional bike ride through the countryside or trip to the theatre. During this time period, X-rays were discovered by Wilhelm Rontgen (incidentally this was the subject of the inaugural Nobel Prize in physics) and radioactivity had just been discovered by Henri Becquerel. There was a lot of attention in finding out whether there were other materials that exhibited these unusual properties. It was the subject of radioactivity that Marie Curie chose for her thesis, discovering that thorium exhibited similar properties. Unknown to the Curies, a  German physicist had already published these discoveries. Despite the setback, the Curies soon discovered polonium, named for Marie’s native home.
On the quest to discover more elements, the Curies needed to move into a larger laboratory. Unable to find a larger workspace, they found an old abandoned shed. In the words of Marie Curie: “Its glass roof did not afford complete shelter from the rain; the heat was suffocating in summer, and the bitter cold of winter was only a little lessened by the iron stove, except in its immediate vicinity. We had to use the adjoining yard for those of our chemical operations involving irritating gases; even then the gases often filled our shed.” The dangerous work paid off, as the Curies soon discovered radium. Along the way, the Curies advanced many of the techniques of radiation, in addition to discovering new elements, and were awarded the Nobel Prize in 1903.
Throughout this entire period, both Marie and Pierre had been handling radioactive substances completely unprotected, and the effect on their health was detrimental to the extent that people around them urged the couple to seek medical attention. The resulting ailments were so bad that Pierre was unable to continue experimental work, passing it all off to Marie. Tragedy soon struck as Pierre died when he slipped crossing a street, and was run over by a horse-drawn wagon. Marie was distraught by the news and, coupled with the effects of radiation, did not bode well. Ernest Rutherford wrote that “.. Marie looked much older than her age. She works much too hard for her health.” He also wrote that he went to the opera with her one night and, by the end, she was unable to walk by herself.
Yet, within a month of Pierre’s death, Marie was back in the laboratory. She had been named a professor at the University of Paris, a position held by her husband. With the new found fame of the Nobel Prize, Marie was able to obtain funding from the wealthy American philanthropist Andrew Carnegie, who was impressed by her ability to do science in the male-dominated field. For the first time, Marie was able to afford lab assistants, several of whom were female, to help with her work. Additionally, she was able to form the Radium Institute, dedicated to the study of radioactivity with emphasis in using it to cure diseases.
In 1911, she was informed that she was being awarded the Nobel Prize in chemistry for the discovery of radium and polonium. She was plagued at the time by a widely-published affair that led her to contemplate suicide.
Einstein described her as having little capacity for joy or pain, and that she would grumble all the time. She soon recovered and recommenced her work. She became involved in the suffragist movement in England, and toured around giving lectures. Her visits were cut short due to World War I and she returned to Paris. During the war she organised over 200 mobile X-ray units to provide medical treatment for soldiers, and even risked her own life and operated one herself.
Marie’s health continued to decline, but she continued to tour and attend scientific conferences, often being the only female. A notable example is the famous 1927 Solvay Conference which discussed the implications of the newly developed quantum theory. Of the 29 attendants, 17 were or would become Nobel laureates. Her scientific output greatly decreased as the effects of radiation poisoning slowed her recoveries from her illnesses. She finally succumbed to her ailments in 1934, and was buried beside her husband. In 1995 both her and her husband were reburied in the Pantheon in Paris in honour of their contributions to science.
Now what about the whole issue of the atomic bomb? Marie Curie had nothing to do with designing, building, or testing it as she died in 1934, about six years before the Manhattan project even began. Yes, she did work extensively on radiation. There is a wide gap between radioactivity and the atomic bomb. It was Einstein who first pointed out the tremendous amount of energy available in atoms, E = mc2. Even with these two pieces of knowledge, one still requires the laws of quantum mechanics, which were not developed until the late 1920s, to understand the mechanisms behind radiation and be able to predict and model nuclear phenomena. Some of the very preliminary results in nuclear physics, that pointed the way to nuclear fission, weren’t discovered until the early 1930s, when Marie was unable to participate due to her illnesses.
If you want to label the so-called “Mother of the Atomic Bomb”, look at Lisa Meitner who co-discovered nuclear fission in 1938 and, in a gross oversight and historically documented case of sexism, was passed over for the Nobel Prize in chemistry (which her male partners won). She was invited to be involved in the Manhattan project, but did not participate by choice.
Whomever made these posters expressed great ignorance of the contributions Marie Curie made to science, and does not realise the barriers that a woman like Marie Curie had to overcome just to be able to attend lectures in the sciences, let alone make fundamental contributions.