• The Elements of Marie Curie: How the Glow of Radium Lit a Path for Women in Science  by Dava Sobel (Atlantic Monthly Press, 2024)

By John Hertz: Thanks to David Grigg for his review in The Megaloscope 15 calling my attention to this fine book. I’m nominating it for Best Related Work.

On the back cover of the copy I got, I note these blurbs:

“Ms. Sobel writes with an eye for a telling detail” (The Wall Street Journal, on her book The Glass Universe). True.

“We forget we’re being educated as we’re being entertained” (Newsweek, on her book The Plonets). True. I wish this compliment did not have to be paid, but never mind that.

Theodore Sturgeon said, in possibly his best pun, “Science fiction is knowledge fiction.” The Latin root of science means knowledge. This book isn’t fiction, but SF lives on science, and Ms. Sobel here does what an SF author must — introduce us to a world in the course of telling a story.

Marie Curie (1867-1934) was the first woman to win a Nobel Prize, the first person to win two, and so far the only person to win in two distinct scientific fields. Actually her work in physics (1903 prize) and chemistry (1911 prize} indicated the interrelation of these two fields, but never mind that.

You know, although Ms. Sobel apparently did not, that the 1987 Duane Elms song “Madame Curie’s Hands” won the 1992 Pegasus Award for Best Tribute.

Mme. Curie discovered polonium and radium. She coined the word “radioactivity”. Her work with radioactive materials burned her hands and may well have killed her. She was not careless; like many scientists, she learned the dangers of what she was doing; as she learned, she explored precautions, and urged them.

This book is mostly about women. I’m biassed (yes, that’s how I spell it, also busses and gasses; if you just left, good-bye} In their favor. I try not to be prejudiced, but biasses can be earned. In fact Mme. Curie was a wife and mother. I think that was as much up to her as whether to be a homemaker or pursue a career — or both. She continually met prejudices about what women were and could do. That did not stop her.

Ms. Sobel organizes her book into thirty chapters and an epilogue {the copy I got is just over 300 pages), all but four named for women important to the story, and all associated with chemical as well as narrative elements — hydrogen, iron, uranium, gold, carbon, bismuth, francium. Like rhymes in poetry, this is ingenious, helpful, and — I’ll say it — beautiful. Poetry can be made without rhymes, books can be otherwise organized. I think Ms. Sobel succeeds, so I applaud.

These women Mme. Curie found and guided, or eventually came looking for her. Fame, when it arrived, mostly annoyed her. She wanted to do her work. This included teaching science to girls.

She was born in Poland, then a country but not a nation; she moved to France; she went to other countries, sometimes overseas; she attended conferences, too often the only woman; she published; she knew her studies had to be shared and discussed. She followed others’ work, using it, acknowledging it. During World War I, seeing how X-rays could help surgeons treat wounded soldiers, she {as Brother Grigg notes) taught people to use X-rays, equipped X-ray vans, and drove one to the front herself. She did not live to see World War II. She knew Bohr, Einstein, Heisenberg, Planck — but women are the focus of this story.

She died on the Fourth of July, at dawn.