In The Elements of Marie Curie: How the Glow of Radium Lit a Path for Women in Science, author Dava Sobel celebrates the many women who came to Paris to work with Marie Curie after she won the 1903 Nobel Prize in Physics. Many of these women went on to become experts in radioactivity, creating their own networks to support female scientists.
Among others, we meet Norwegian radiochemist Ellen Gleditsch, who was the first person to introduce the science of radioactivity to Norway and Canadian nuclear physicist Harriet Brooks, who eventually gave up her stellar scientific career to marry. In retelling the story of Marie Curie, Sobel also shows how the women she mentored contributed to the periodic table in the early 20th century.
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Dava Sobel: The Sorbonne invited her to take over the laboratory and also to assume Pierre’s physics class as a professor. At that ancient university, she was the first woman ever to teach. So, she was already world famous because of the Nobel Prize, but now she’s in an unprecedented situation; she’s director of a laboratory and a professor at a major university. She was the only woman in the world with that kind of status, and that’s what brought the women to her.
Deborah Unger: Hello, I’m Deborah Unger, senior managing producer at “Lost Women of Science,” and you host for today’s episode of “Lost Women of Science Conversations.” This is a series where we talk with authors, poets, and artists who focus on forgotten female scientists.
At “Lost Women of Science,” we have a line we use often when we talk about what we do. We say: for every Marie Curie, there are hundreds of female scientists whom you’ve never heard of. And that’s our mission. To tell their stories.
So, why are we starting with Marie Curie? Well today, I’m joined by Dava Sobel, whose new book not only reminds us of the life and achievements of Marie Curie but also introduces us to another part of her story: the many women—more than 40 it seems—that Madame Curie worked with in her lab and mentored, and who, unlike their boss, have pretty much been forgotten.
Dava, welcome to “Lost Women of Science.”
Dava Sobel: I’m happy to be with you.
Deborah Unger: It’s so good to have you here.
So, first, a little background about you. You were born and raised in New York. You are an award-winning science writer and author of six nonfiction books and a play. Your first book, “Longitude,” was published in 1995, about a man who figured out how to determine longitude at sea. But over the years, Dava, you have often chosen to focus on female scientists.
“Galileo’s Daughter” was a Pulitzer Prize finalist in 2000. “The Glass Universe” took us into the world of female astronomers in the early 1900s at the Harvard Observatory. And your latest book, which we’re going to talk about today, is “The Elements of Marie Curie: How the Glow of Radium Lit a Path for Women in Science.” The book details the life of Marie Curie and the untold story of the dozens of young women who studied and worked with her in Paris.
First, let me tell you just how much I enjoyed the book. It’s so close to our hearts here at “Lost Women of Science.”
So, can I ask, how and why did you decide to make Marie Curie’s women the center of your book?
Dava Sobel: I really came to a sobering realization while writing “The Glass Universe” that I had misogynistic tendencies, which I never thought I could be accused of as a woman, but there I was writing about a group of women. I chose the story because there were all these women scientists in the same room, but I kept being surprised by what they had done, and that was very disconcerting to me. Why am I so surprised at how hard they worked, how much they achieved? And the only answer I could come up with was that I had absorbed a lot of the negative attitudes about women that were in the air when I was growing up in the 1950s, even though, in my own family, my mother had an advanced degree in chemistry and work for a while at a lab in a hospital.
My father always encouraged me to go into medicine as a career, not as a nurse, but as a doctor. And despite all of that, I had grown up with the attitude that women aren’t scientists. So, once I had the religion, I was looking for other stories, and my editor suggested a new biography of Madame Curie.
And I said, no, she’s, she’s already well known, I’ve read a biography of her, don’t have anything new to say. But then, I was asked to review a book called “Women In Their Element,” which was a compilation of about 35 profiles of women chemists. And Madame Curie was one of the people in the book, and her daughter, Irène, was another.
But then, there were at least half a dozen others who mentioned some sort of formative period in Madame Curie’s laboratory. And even used the expression, the Curie lab. And that…I’m thrilled even now just remembering that moment of, wow, she, she had a room full of women and nobody knows.
Deborah Unger: Yes, it’s quite remarkable, and yes, I also agree with you that it’s so easy to fall into the trap of misogyny about being surprised about what women could do and bring to science. And I wonder how Madame Curie herself felt about that and whether that became part of her goal to mentor these women.
Dava Sobel: She was always a teacher. She was born into this family of teachers. Both her parents were teachers, even heads of schools. And she began teaching very young. She taught privately as a governess. And her own higher education was thwarted in Warsaw. It’s very strange because in Russia, there were women who attended university, but in that area of Polish cultural heritage, the women were now barred from university. And she really felt a mission to teach, and she and one of her sisters attended what was called the Flying University. So, this was an underground program to provide higher education for women. It was all in secret, highly illegal. But then, they got the idea of going to Paris to become educated, and Marie worked as a governess for seven years, helping support her sister, who was in medical school in Paris.
Deborah Unger: It’s a crazy story, isn’t it? It’s just amazing.
Dava Sobel: It’s a fantastic story! So then, it was Marie’s turn to go, and the sister would help support her, and that’s what happened.
And her idea was to get an advanced degree and then go back to Poland and teach. But, in Paris, she met Pierre.
Deborah Unger: That was in the late 1900s and I guess that also changed everything for her. They married in 1895, just four years after she had arrived in France. And it was their partnership in life and work that would eventually lead them sharing the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1903, for the discovery of radium and polonium. They had their own laboratory by then, but at what point did women begin to join them?
Dava Sobel: Not until after Pierre’s death. They had worked together, they had become world famous as a couple. And shortly, only, only three years, really, after their Nobel Prize, Pierre was killed in an accident, and that left Marie, at age 38, a widow with two young children, and probably no prospects, except that the university recognized her as the only person, really qualified to take over that laboratory, which was technically Pierre’s because by then their laboratory was attached to the university, the Sorbonne.
Deborah Unger: And it was dedicated to this new field of science: radioactivity.
Dava Sobel: And that was her word, “radioactivity.” She actually coined that term for what was first called uranic rays. Hardly anyone was paying attention to the uranic rays, so she chose that as the topic for her doctoral dissertation, and she was doing the work alone until she thought that, in the course of her experiments, she had discovered an unknown element. And that was so interesting that Pierre dropped what he was doing and joined her. And so together, they discovered two new elements. And since these elements shared Uranium’s property of giving off these mysterious rays, she needed a new word. It wasn’t just uranic. It was radioactive.
Deborah Unger: It’s hard for us to imagine now that what they were doing was just filling in the gaps in the periodic table. Today, we see it as complete, but back then, that was not the case.
Dava Sobel: Exactly. And they didn’t know yet why the elements needed to be placed where they were. They didn’t know at first exactly how many gaps there were; it really was a second scientific revolution, and she was in the thick of it.
Deborah Unger: And what happened after she lost Pierre?
Dava Sobel: The Sorbonne invited her to take over the laboratory and also to assume Pierre’s physics class as a professor. At that ancient university, she was the first woman ever to teach. So, she was already world-famous because of the Nobel Prize. But now she’s in an unprecedented situation, she’s director of a laboratory and a professor at a major university. She was the only woman in the world with that kind of status, and that’s what brought the women to her.
So, the first one came just a few months after Pierre died, and she came all the way from Canada. Her name was Harriet Brooks, and she was extremely experienced.
Right around the time Madame Curie got interested in uranic rays, Ernest Rutherford, who was then in Canada, also got interested, and was doing a lot of experiments and trying to figure out what these rays were and what happened to these elements that gave off this activity. And Harriet Brooks was his first graduate student. He was young, and he was a newcomer to Canada. He was really from New Zealand, but had gone to England to study. And then this wonderful teaching opportunity opened in Canada. So he took it, and there was this young woman at the top of her class, and he gave her an opportunity.
Deborah Unger: There’s a fantastic picture in your book. You may know the one that I’m thinking of…
Dava Sobel: I, I do.
Deborah Unger: Harriet is standing in the midst of all these men, and she’s almost wearing the same clothes as they are. You could miss thinking she was a woman.
Dava Sobel: It’s the hats, they all have these derby hats on. She was really at the forefront of this new field of radioactivity. So it was no surprise that she would seek a place with Madame Curie. And she was there for almost a year and then threw it all up in the air to get married.
Deborah Unger: I guess that would have been almost expected of a woman in those days but given how good a scientist she was, and how appreciated she was by the leading physicists of the time, it seems a little surprising. But how did you first come to know her story?
Dava Sobel: I first found her in that book I mentioned “Women in Their Element,” because she had actually discovered what we now call radon, which is a gas. So when radium decays, that’s the first thing it decays to, is radon. And at the time, the idea that one element would give rise to another sounded like alchemy, and it was a dangerous notion. And so she and Rutherford never claimed that they had found a new element. They just called it “radium emanation.” But in retrospect, she had helped to discover radon, that’s how she got herself in that collection of essays about women chemists.
But there’s also a full biography about Harriet Brooks by a married couple who are both chemists and writers. And that was fantastically helpful. They had even been in touch with one of her children for the writing of their biography.
Deborah Unger: Harriet is fascinating on so many levels. I want to get back to her, but she is just one of many women you talk about in your book. How did you find the other female scientists? I imagine they didn’t have stand-alone biographies.
Dava Sobel: The others were harder to find. The Curie Museum in Paris had published a book in French of capsule biographies of all the women who passed through the lab, and that was also helpful, but for many of the women, the records are so thin that you can barely say anything about them.
Deborah Unger: But you were able to flesh out their stories and give them standalone chapters in your book. Now this is something I’ve been wondering about. I imagine it is no accident that the chapters are named for the elements in the periodic table, and you tie the women to the chapters. I loved that idea of the women reflected in the elements. Is that a way of showing their personality or showing their science?
Dava Sobel: Thank you, I wondered about that too. At first, I was hoping the elements could be about their personalities, but the elements… The periodic table is a character in the story. And the elements actually refer to their science, to whatever they were working on. Or, someone’s experiment, or something that came up, and it makes a little, little challenge for the reader if you care to look for it and guess why that element is the name of that chapter.
Deborah Unger: So, in effect, it was more of finding out about them through the work that they did. I guess they were given things to work on by Madame Curie. And she would have tried to figure out what would be the most useful thing for each particular woman to investigate.
Dava Sobel: Right. And again, some of them came with no experience in radioactivity. So they really needed her or someone in the lab to tell them what to do and teach them how to work with these materials.
Deborah Unger: That’s interesting because at that point, people didn’t realize how dangerous that was.
Dava Sobel: That’s right.
Deborah Unger: You go into great detail about the process of extracting radioactive elements from ores, which was absolutely fascinating and painstaking. In fact, your book never shies away from the science.
Dava Sobel: I thought that was crucial, because the biographies usually leave out the science, but when a person is a scientist, the science seems crucial. And I did try to explain the science to a degree I thought reasonable. I had to come to understand it myself first, which was difficult. Because the science was at such an early stage, even talking about why the periodic table was arranged the way it was at the very beginning. Nowadays, if you look up a term like atomic weight, you know, it’ll tell you, well, that’s the number of protons plus the number of neutrons in the nucleus of the atom. Well, some people didn’t accept the concept of the atom at the beginning of this story, and certainly not the idea that it had component parts.
So, to explain what they were doing, with the knowledge they had at the time was the challenge, and the knowledge of the danger developed very slowly, which is a little surprising because they noticed right away. Madame Curie talked about the fact that the skin on her hands just peeled off, and her fingers were painful and were numb for weeks at a time.
Deborah Unger: It’s interesting to put oneself in that position, to be working on such toxic materials. But it was also exciting to be at the forefront of this new science, and that comes across so clearly in your book.
More about Madame Curie’s women after the break.
Deborah Unger: Now, let’s talk more about the women who came from all over the world to work with Madame Curie. One that I found especially fascinating, as sort of the polar opposite of Harriet Brooks—who gave it all up for marriage—was the Norwegian scientist Ellen Gleditsch.
Dava Sobel: Right, f, who came not knowing anything about radioactivity, but becoming, very adept, very quickly. She was a chemist before she came, but she just had no experience with radio elements, and stayed five years, and was given very important work to do. And then when she went back to Norway, she was the first person to teach about radioactivity in that country. And she did become a full professor. Took a long time, took till after she was 50, but she did.
And she was also at the head of a global organization. A women’s organization that was started by a lot of the alumni from the Curie Lab, for the purpose of giving scholarship support to women and opportunities to work abroad.
Deborah Unger: That’s very interesting this collaborative idea that women felt that they very much needed to band together in order to support other female scientists, particularly at that time. It’s kind of like what Madame Curie did in her lab—acting as a mentor. Do you think that’s something that is very important for women in science to have this strong bond with mentors and mentees?
Dava Sobel: It’s certainly the most positive situation, but it doesn’t always happen. And I hear lots of stories about women who make it, and then they feel reluctant to help younger women, but for the most part, I think, I think, women do band together.
Deborah Unger: And I guess Marie Curie was the instigator in a sense of opening her lab to all these women.
Dava Sobel: Yes, and it’s not as though she sought them out. I don’t think you could say that she was doing this intentionally. What she did that was so important was to not reject them. You know, if anyone who came with a good recommendation from someone she trusted was in, even if she didn’t have room.. Somehow, somehow she made room and, and let them come in.
And of course, all the time, she was agitating for more lab space and eventually turned her lab into a world-class research institution, the Radium Institute.
Deborah Unger: But it wasn’t like that in the beginning, was it? The early lab sounded very ramshackle in a way,
Dava Sobel: It was very ramshackle. In fact, someone who visited it after they won the Nobel Prize said that it looked like a cross between a stable and a potato seller. And he thought it was a practical joke, you know, that that could not have been the place where this research happened.
Deborah Unger: So did the women, like Harriet Brooks, for example, feel they were working at the cutting edge of the new science in this run-down lab?
Dava Sobel: By the time Harriet Brooks came, they had moved out of the potato cellar into what was called the Annex at the Sorbonne. So, they had rooms scattered in a couple of buildings. Still inadequate, but better than the potato cellar. And that’s what she found.
And she was coming from McGill University, which was new, and which was built with the intention of providing the best physical science facilities in the world. And then she gets to Paris, and it was a disappointment.
Deborah Unger: But she stuck it out, and Marie Curie even offered her a scholarship to continue her research. However, it seems the pull of marriage was too great, and she ended up turning down the opportunity. Disappointing in a way, but not surprising at the time. We sort of feel your disappointment at that point in the book. But in the next chapter, you introduce us to Ellen Gleditch, who stuck with the science and is, I suspect, a favorite of yours.
Dava Sobel: Well, I’d say Ellen is absolutely my favorite, but I think it’s very important to talk about Marguerite Perey, who was the last one Madame Curie hired. She was hired as a lab technician. She was top of her class in the Paris Academy for female lab technicians. And, immediately showed herself extremely intelligent, capable. And so they worked on very complex problems and were in the middle of something when Madame Curie died. So, Marguerite stayed on and did independent work and discovered an element, an element that she named Francium. And then the… The then supervisors of the lab who included Madame Curie’s daughter, Irène, encouraged her to get her doctorate. And she wrote her dissertation about this discovery, and later became the first woman admitted to the French Academy of Sciences.
Deborah Unger: That’s extraordinary, that Madame Curie was never admitted.
Dava Sobel: She was rejected. Immutable tradition.
Deborah Unger: Goodness, one can’t quite get one’s head around that. But how long did it take for the academy to open up to women?
Dava Sobel: So Marguerite had a kind of second-class citizen membership. She was in, but she couldn’t vote. And it took till 1979 before the first woman was admitted with full privileges.
Deborah Unger: 1979. That’s also pretty extraordinary because it is so long after the rise of the feminist movement. Which brings me to another subject that I found so interesting: Madame Curie’s life as a mother. We’ve talked about Harriet Brooks, who gave it all up so that she could marry and have children. And Ellen Gleditsch never married and had no interest in having children. Then we have Marie Curie, who did everything.
Dava Sobel: Which makes her just an impossible kind of role model! Because it astounds me how well she serves as a role model, because if you look at her, how can you even aspire to a fraction of her achievements?
Harriet Brooks convinced herself after she left the lab that women were ill-suited to science. And she gave a speech to the McGill Alumni Association about her time working with Madame Curie, in which she took pains to say that the reason so few women were in the field is that it’s really not for women. They’re just not suited to it. You know, as though she had never been in the field and well suited to it.
So, I think she must have… This is my five cents psychoanalytic take on it: that she felt guilty for leaving. You know, after Madame Curie, Harriet Brooks is the most prominent woman in the science of radioactivity. So, to give that up took some, some doing, and it was difficult.
Whereas, Madame Curie’s attitude was, I’m going to try to do everything. And fortunately for her, right around the time the first child was born, her father-in-law, who was a widower, moved in with them to take care of the baby. And that’s what enabled her to go and do this work that garnered a Nobel Prize.
And then the second child came along, and the father-in-law was still there, and after Pierre’s death, he stayed on. But this remains a major problem for women today is childcare. A study was done that showed 40 percent of women scientists in the United States drop out when they have a child.
Deborah Unger: So, it seems that problem of a life in science, and a life as a parent, existed then and still exists today.
Dava Sobel: Yes, it’s an inescapable fact that women scientists have to confront. Things are not equal, really, in that regard. So, how do we support women who want to do both? Because they should be free to.
Deborah Unger: I couldn’t agree with you more. And it’s the same in many professions, not just science, I have to say.
Now, before we go, I would just like to ask about your own process as a writer. Your books are so deeply researched and so carefully written. Can I ask what you enjoy the most when investigating and writing these kinds of stories, and do you have any help?
Dava Sobel: I am often approached by young people interested in science writing who want to work for me as a research assistant. And I have to tell them that that’s the best part! I don’t really want anybody else to be poking around the library or the internet trying to figure out what information there is and how, how this is all going to come together.
And because I work by myself, I have the liberty to set my own schedule and work at the time that I work best, which is very early in the morning. So, my ideal work day would be waking up at four, not by an alarm clock, just because I wake up at that time. And I go right to work.
It’s those early morning thoughts, whatever I’m doing, whether it’s research, writing, that’s the time I can accomplish in one hour, then what it would take me the whole afternoon to do.
And then if you’re up early, it’s often dark at that hour, and you could pretend to be anywhere. And so sometimes, I think of myself as being in the lab or at the observatory. Ah, it’s a, it’s a great secret place, because till you write the book, it is all just your secret.
Deborah Unger: And what you just said is a wonderful moment to end this conversation. We can all think of you in the early morning, it’s still dark outside, you’re thinking about the women, you’re thinking about Madame Curie, and you’re walking your way through her labs, contemplating her life and what she’d done and the women that she had helped. And you are there walking with her.
Thank you very much, Dava Sobel, for being with me today and sharing your thoughts on Marie Curie, her women, and this wonderful book, “The Elements of Marie Curie: How the Glow of Radium Lit a Path for Women in Science.”
Dava Sobel: It’s a pleasure speaking with you. Thanks.
Deborah Unger: This has been “Lost Women of Science Conversations.” This episode was hosted by me, Deborah Unger. Natalia Sanchez Loayza produced this episode, and Ana Tuiran was our sound engineer. Lizzy Younan composes all of our music, and Lily Whear designed our art. Special thanks to our program manager, Eowyn Burtner, and our co-executive producers, Katie Hafner and Amy Scharf.
Thanks also to Jeff DelVisio and our publishing partner, “Scientific American.”
“Lost Women of Science” is funded in part by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and the Anne Wojcicki Foundation. We’re distributed by PRX. If you’ve enjoyed this conversation, please go to our website lostwomenofscience.org, and subscribe so you’ll never miss an episode.
That’s lostwomenofscience.org. And please share it and give us a rating wherever you listen to podcasts. And, oh, don’t forget to click on the all-important donate button. That helps us bring you even more stories of important female scientists.
I’m Deborah Unger. See you next time.
Host
Deborah Unger
Producer
Natalia Sánchez Loayza
Guest
Dava Sobel
Dava Sobel is the author of the international bestseller Longitude, the bestselling Pulitzer Prize finalist Galileo’s Daughter, The Planets, A More Perfect Heaven, And the Sun Stood Still, and The Glass Universe, and coauthor of The Illustrated Longitude. She is the recipient of the Individual Public Service Award from the National Science Board, the Bradford Washburn Award, the Kumpke-Roberts Award from the Astronomical Society of the Pacific, and a Guggenheim Fellowship, among other honors.
FURTHER READING
The Elements of Marie Curie: How the Glow of Radium Lit a Path for Women in Science. Dava Sobel. Atlantic Monthly Press, 2024
“The Untold Story of Marie Curie’s Network of Female Scientists,” by Clara Moskowitz, in Scientific American; February 2025
Harriet Brooks: Pioneer Nuclear Scientist. Marelene Rayner-Canham and Geoffrey Rayner-Canham. McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1992
“Ellen Gleditsch: Pioneer Woman in Radiochemistry,” by Annette Lykknes et al., in Physics in Perspective, Vol. 6; June 2004
Women in Their Element: Selected Women’s Contributions to the Periodic System. Edited by Annette Lykknes and Brigitte Van Tiggelen. World Scientific Publishing, 2019
