Dr. Marie Curie’s Endless Inspiration
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People often ask me to share stories that will inspire their daughters and sisters—as well as the men in their lives—to embrace a STEM mindset. There are many stories out there, from Dr. Rosalind Franklin (her data were crucial to solving the structure of DNA) to Dr. Meredith Halks-Miller (her discovery led to early cancer detection) to Dr. Sylvia Earle (a pioneer in ocean conservation) to Dr. Özlem Türeci (co-founder of BioNTech, now famous for mRNA vaccines) to Dr. Jennifer Doudna (one of the co-discoverers of CRISPR and a vocal proponent of how to use the technology ethically).
Want to learn more about the contributions of these amazing women to biotech and STEM? Check out my talk for Cordoba Tech Week! Video here.
And for every one of these visible women, there are generations of women who have made the world better, without fanfare or even basic recognition.
These women inspire me every day. But whose story draws me back, over and over?
Dr. Marie Curie. Only four people have ever won two Nobel Prizes; Dr. Curie is one of them (and in different fields!). And yet, to me, this remarkable achievement may be the least interesting thing about her story.
The Legend
Much has been written about Dr. Curie’s early struggles to employ her astonishing talents as a physicist and chemist. I particularly love the book written by one of her daughters, Eve Curie, which details Marie’s journey as a child in Poland through her death in 1934 due to years of exposure to radiation.
My first edition copy of Madame Curie: A Biography by Eve Curie
I own a first edition of Madame Curie, and it’s one of my cherished possessions. Here’s how the book begins:
“The life of Marie Curie contains prodigies in such number that one would like to tell her story like a legend.”
“A powerful vocation summoned her from her motherland, Poland, to study in Paris, where she lived through years of poverty and solitude. There she met a man whose genius was akin to hers. She married him; their happiness was unique. By the most desperate and arid effort they discovered a magic element, radium. This discovery not only gave birth to a new science and a new philosophy: it provided mankind with the means of treating a dreadful disease.”
Just three years after Marie and her husband, Pierre Curie, shared a Nobel Prize in Physics for their study of radiation, Pierre was killed in a tragic accident. After her husband’s death, Marie was at last invited to give a lecture at the Sorbonne. She was the first woman to receive that invitation, and it only came after years of major contributions as a scientist.
Even though their work on radioactive substances set the stage for a massive breakthrough in cancer treatment, Marie, Pierre, and their daughters remained quite poor. The situation worsened after Pierre’s death.
Why was money a problem?
Because sometime around 1905, Marie and Pierre decided—quite deliberately, and as a team—to not patent their discoveries. They clearly understood that their work would massively disrupt medicine. They knew that cancer patients around the world would be clamoring for treatments based on the Curies’ work. But as Marie is reported to have said:
“It is impossible. It would be contrary to the scientific spirit.”
Astonishing, isn’t it? Quite different from today’s “rush to market” mindset.
A Perpetual Giving
Incredibly, Marie’s inspirational story doesn’t end there. Here’s how the Introduction to Marie Curie puts it:
“The rest of her life resolves itself into a kind of perpetual giving.”
For Marie, there was a second Nobel Prize in 1911, this time in Chemistry. The Prize, which was awarded to her alone (an unusual occurrence), acknowledged her nearly superhuman efforts to isolate the radioactive elements radium and polonium. Over a lifetime of scientific investigations, she was exposed to so much radiation that to this day her body (and Pierre’s), as well as her laboratory notebooks, must remain encased in lead.
Then … 1914. World War I. Marie watched her male colleagues go off to war, while she was left behind in Paris.
How could she make a contribution?
If Marie became a nurse, she would be just one woman laboring on the battlefield. How could she scale her impact on the frontlines?
💡 Relentless as ever, Marie zoomed in on the job to be done: in order to counter the shattering loss of life in this war, she needed to bring cutting-edge diagnostics to the frontlines. The technology she had in mind was fairly new; at the time, there were only a few X-ray machines in France. They were big, they were expensive, and only a few doctors knew how to use them.
Marie had never actually worked with X-rays, but she was confident that they were the solution. The larger issue was how to transform the technology into something useful in the heat of battle, where saving a soldier’s life could hinge on a matter of minutes.
Marie figured out how to transform an ordinary car into a mobile X-ray unit. But she didn’t stop with designing these “little Curies”. She hustled for funding. She cajoled the rich women of Paris into donating their cars, with the promise that she would give the cars after the war. Ever honest, Marie would add, “Truthfully, if it’s not useless by then, I shall give it back to you!”
Dr. Marie Curie equipped cars with mobile X-ray machines and drove them to active battlefields, where she worked side-by-side with army surgeons to save wounded soldiers.
With her own hands, Marie equipped 20 of these cars with mobile X-ray machines and drove them to active battlefields, where she worked side-by-side with army surgeons to save wounded soldiers. For hours, days even, under gruelling and dangerous conditions.
There’s more. Marie also designed and installed 200 radiological rooms on the frontlines. It’s been estimated that she personally touched the lives of more than a million wounded men with her X-ray innovations alone. Marie also designed radiology courses through which hundreds of soldiers and (largely female) technicians learned to use the equipment and to understand the physics and anatomy that were crucial to saving lives.
She Was All Flame
Every time I tell this story, every single time, tears spring into my eyes.
Here we have the story of a woman who was repeatedly kicked down by “the system”, no matter how brilliant her work and how tenacious her spirit. I’ve largely skipped that part of the tale here, but I suggest you check out just how hard it was for Marie to get a degree, a job, a laboratory, even though her science far outstripped just about all the work being done by her male counterparts. Even after winning Nobel Prizes, Dr. Curie was seen as a woman first and a scientist second.
Nevertheless, she persisted.
In 1914, Paris was in danger of falling. Instead of fleeing, Marie boarded a train to retrieve perhaps the most precious scientific artifact in Europe: a gram of radioactive radium. With its heavy lead shielding, It weighed 20 kg and was worth about a million francs. She carried it on a train, in a bag. On the way back to Paris, she was the only civilian on a slow-moving train full of soldiers sent to defend the capitol.
When at last she arrived home, a close friend and colleague was appalled at her hungry, exhausted state. He begged her to lie down, to rest, but that she would not do. He later wrote, “On that sofa, with her face so pale and her eyes so big, she was all flame.”
💡 This is how Dr. Marie Curie lives in my mind: as a flame in the darkness, consuming itself to bring light and warmth to a troubled world.
At the end of a talk, I often tell my audience to think about a chemical catalyst. A catalyst is something that increases the rate of a reaction without being consumed. I urge them to impact the world without burning out—so that they can go on to achieve even more impact.
Whenever I say this, Dr. Curie’s face floats in the back of my mind. How many more lives could have been transformed if she hadn’t expended so much energy just to work as a female scientist? If she had known the dangers of slipping test tubes of radioactive material into her pocket, or of working at night by their eerie glow?
What else could she have achieved, given more time?
Dr. Marie Curie inspires me to do the most I can with the time that I have. With this story, I hope that you find your own inspiration—inspiration that you can pass on to the people around you who are just beginning their journey to transform our world.
About Tiffany
Dr. Tiffany Vora speaks, writes, and advises on how to harness technology to build the best possible future(s). She is an expert in biotech, health, & innovation.
For a full list of topics and ways to collaborate, visit Tiffany’s Work Together webpage.
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