SCIENCE
The Elements of Marie Curie
Dava Sobel
4th Estate, $34.99
Dava Sobel is one of the world’s most successful, and accessible, science writers. Known for 1995’s best-selling Longitude, here she beautifully elaborates the life and work of the most famous female scientist of all time.
Indeed, the subtitle of the book, How the glow of radium lit a path for women in science, tells us that we are not here just to be reminded of the trials and triumphs of Curie, but to meet, if only en passant, many of the dozens of women she nurtured and encouraged throughout her astonishing career.
The imaginative structuring of the book, with each chapter named after a chemical element and a girl or woman who was to benefit from Marie’s benevolence and encouragement, makes her management of these inspiring character sketches seem effortless.
Chapter 10, for example, is titled “Sybil (Thorium)“. This clever textual architecture allows Sobel to chart out Curie’s career – she is, after all, the star of the show – while bringing to life many of the brilliant young women she hired and inspired over decades. Women who, like her, had to work twice as hard as their male counterparts for recognition.
Marie Curie was born Marya Salomea Sklodowska in 1867, in Warsaw, then part of the Russian Empire. A precocious child, leaving school at 15 and top of her class and with the annual gold medal, by the age of 17 Marya was conducting private lessons in French, arithmetic and geometry. As a governess in the countryside, teaching the children of a family of well-to-do beet farmers, she spent her evenings reading anything and everything to do with science and mathematics that she could lay her hands on.
Curie, one of only two women, at a physics conference in Brussels in 1933.Credit: Getty
“When I feel myself quite unable to read with profit, I work problems of algebra and geometry … which get me back on the right road,” she wrote to a friend in 1887. She taught the children of the beet farm’s peasant workers to read and write in Polish in her spare time, a dangerously patriotic pursuit when Russian was the only language permitted in a classroom.
A fierce pride in her Polish heritage – a trait inherited from her high-school maths teacher father – was much later to be carved in perpetuity into that perennial map of nature that adorns every science classroom, the periodic table of the elements, when she discovered and named polonium, in 1898.
