The Elements of Marie Curie by Dava Sobel review – the great scientist who created her own school | Biography books

Marie Curie carried out some of her most pathbreaking work under an actual glass ceiling and the toxic particles that swirled beneath it eventually killed her. What Dava Sobel wants to convey to us in this unabashedly feminist account of the great woman’s life is that the metaphorical glass ceiling was just as toxic to the society over which it was clamped.

Each occasion the two-time Nobel laureate had a new advance to announce to the world, she had to beg a male colleague to present it to France’s scientific academy, which barred women from its ranks. This iron-clad rule outlived Curie, hobbling her daughter Irène – another Nobel laureate – in her turn, and by the time a woman was finally granted full membership, in 1979, not only were both Marie and Irène more famous than most of the men who had blocked them, but that first female member gave her affiliation as the “Pierre and Marie Curie University”, Paris.

The academy couldn’t even claim that Marie was riding on her husband’s coat-tails, since Pierre had died tragically early in their marriage and she went on to great things – including a second Nobel prize – alone. A true scientist, she was never really alone, though. There were individual men – Pierre first among them – who recognised her brilliance and whose support for her never faltered. The physicist Paul Langevin, briefly her lover once she had been widowed, remained loyal long after the affair and accompanying scandal had fizzled out. That much we knew. What wasn’t so well known, and which Sobel brings out in her new biography, is that Curie created her own school and that many of those she mentored and set on the path to prominence were women. Each of those women inspired many others, in a radioactive cascade that would have lit up one of Irène’s cherished cloud chambers.

These were, necessarily, unconventional careers – and all the more inspiring for that. It’s hard to imagine a young woman arriving in France or any western country today, as Marie Skłodowska did in 1891, penniless, lacking a university degree, barely speaking the local lingo and going on to win a Nobel prize just over a decade later – and credit must go to the institutions and individuals who made that possible. There were women who passed through the Curie lab whose discoveries were feted around the world before they had obtained their baccalaureate, let alone a PhD. These “laboratory daughters” were fiercely loyal to Curie, and when her real daughter showed intellectual promise, she assembled a version of the “flying university” that she had benefited from in her youth in Russian-occupied Warsaw to help realise that promise. Irène was home schooled by some of the most respected thinkers of their generation. This is how scientific dynasties are born.

There were enough holes in the periodic table in the early 20th century to keep Curie in the lab for several lifetimes, but she didn’t hesitate to step outside it when the world called. The first world war having created a demand for mobile X-ray units, she built the units and learned to drive, then enlisted the ever-willing Irène as her aide-de-camp. If the book has a fault, it’s that the world doesn’t get the same attention to detail as Dmitri Mendeleev’s brilliant ordering of the elements. In the spring of 1919, the Curies’ otherwise healthy second daughter, Ève, came down with double pneumonia, aged 14. Sobel doesn’t mention that this happened against the backdrop of a flu pandemic – a disaster that claimed many more lives than the war.

Overall, though, her short and well-paced book succeeds in dispelling the dust that clings to some accounts of this most famous of lives and makes it fresh again. Her explanations of the science allow the reader to grasp how one experiment led logically to the next in the search for radioactive elements and particles, and to puzzle or rejoice with the scientists as the results come in. Their thirst for knowledge might have come close to an addiction, because even after they knew how toxic their workspace was, they were drawn ineluctably back into it.

They paid the price. We knew that too, but perhaps not to what extent. In an appendix entitled The Radioactivists, Sobel provides potted biographies of the dramatis personae. It’s shocking how many died of the effects of radiation exposure – effects that were sometimes recognised at the time, sometimes only later – and of course they weren’t the only ones. But then there were the countless others whose lives were saved or prolonged thanks to Curie’s discoveries – as well as the discoveries of the many women (and some men) who, but for her, would never have seen the inside of a lab.