It is a good bet that if most scientists and engineers were honest, they would most like to leave something behind that future generations would remember. While Marie Curie met that standard — she was the first woman to win the Nobel prize because of her work with radioactivity, and a unit of radioactivity (yes, we know — not the SI unit) is a Curie. However, Curie also left something else behind inadvertently: radioactive residue. As the BBC explains, science detectives are retracing her steps and facing some difficult decisions about what to do with contaminated historical artifacts.
Marie was born in Poland and worked in Paris. Much of the lab she shared with her husband is contaminated with radioactive material transferred by the Curies’ handling of things like radium with their bare hands.
Some of the traces have been known for years, including some on the lab notebooks the two scientists shared. However, they are still finding contamination, including at her family home, presumably brought in from the lab.
There is some debate about whether all the contamination is actually from Marie. Her daughter, Irène, also used the office. The entire story starts when Marie realized that radioactive pitchblende contained uranium and thorium, but was more radioactive than those two elements when they were extracted. The plan was to extract all the uranium and thorium from a sample, leaving this mystery element.
It was a solid plan, but working in a store room and, later, a shed with no ventilation and handling materials bare-handed wasn’t a great idea. They did isolate two elements: polonium (named after Marie’s birth country) and radium. Research eventually proved fatal as Marie succumbed to leukemia, probably due to other work she did with X-rays. She and her husband are now in Paris’ Pantheon, in lead-lined coffins, just in case.
If you want a quick video tour of the museum, [Sem Wonders] has a video you can see, below. If you didn’t know about the Curie’s scientist daughter, we can help you with that. Meanwhile, you shouldn’t be drinking radium.
She won two Nobels, in different years, for Physics and Chemistry.
And her daughter also won a Nobel prize. The average number of Nobel prizes in a parent-child pair is vanishingly close to zero, so this makes them probably the cleverest family since records began.
The whole world is like that shed with all the “experiments” that 8 billion are trying at the same time. Sometime in the future they will be shocked with no way to clean it up.
No way to clean it up? That’s either an ignorant or disingenuous statement. Anti-nuclear folks need to learn more about nuclear technology.
I am referring to the greater mess overall including plastics, loss of insects, soil biome, and ocean photo synthesis. Unless we get into nuking the world the rest of it is mostly harmless if isolated.
When I was studying at UC Berkeley in the 1980s, one of my grad school friends had an office in the room where Plutonium was discovered. They did some kind of survey for a renovation project and found that sometime in the 1940s some radioactive liquid was spilled on the wall behind his desk and there were footprints down the hall.
Those traces are not actually a danger to anyone at this point. Just sensationalism… Which she would not have approved of.
Not Marie Curie, but Marie SKŁODOWSKA-Curie!
Marie Skłodowska-Curie
She was adamant on using hyphened name Maria Curie-Skłodowska she gave so much to the world and yet she’s still disrespected.
“…and yet she’s still disrespected…”
What? Who “still disrespects” her? She won two Nobel prizes, for crying out loud.
Nobody respects her wish to be called by her full name: Maria Curie-Skłodowska
She was born in the Russian empire, in a region ceded by France to the Russian empire called Congress Poland.
And she was from a Polish noble family (we all know what they used to call ‘noble’ right?). Which possibly might be why she insisted on that name? Bragging rights?
Words cannot offend the dead.
She didn’t use a hyphen, and added her husband’s surname to the end. So it’s actually Maria Skłodowska Curie, as shown by her signature…
Maria Skłodowska-Curie. She was Polish, don’t erase that part of our country’s history. She wasn’t French.
Also, her name was “Maria”, not “Marie”. If you can say “Tchaikovsky” then you can say “Maria Skłodowska-Curie” as well.
Back then Nobel prize was easily obtainable for accidentaly placing a rock on a photographic paper. Now if a 13 years old would build entire LHC in his bedroom it still would not be “scientific enough” for those fools at Nobel Comintern… I mean Commitee.
To date, this is the weirdest hot-take on scientific achievement that I’ve read. A Nobel prize is all about doing something new and impactful, so yes, doing what other people have already done isn’t enough.
Yet the fools haven’t given the zero point energy guys their due!
They are blind to the hollow flat earth and are in fact lizards themselves.
All the great discoveries are obvious in hindsight…
That said, there is no Nobel prize in economics.
The economists just made that one up.
After which the Nobel reptilians passed a cluster of laws to prevent a parade though that loophool.
Otherwise we’d have Nobel prizes in astrology, scientology auditing, chiropractic adjusting and sociology by now.
Serendipity has been the cause of a number of important discoveries in physics and chemistry, some in the 20th century leading to a Nobel Prize.
However when serendipity occurs, as in the case of Henri Becquerel, it is not accidentally placing a rock on a covered photographic plate, or developing the plate and seeing the image, but by discovering why it occurred.that leads to a Nobel Prize.
That video was unbearable. Just some tiktok nonsense of text overlaying b-roll of the museum. I would much prefer a forgotten weapons type video where someone methodically examines her work area and equipment.
The Curie unit was named in honor of Marie’s husband, 1903 Nobel Laureate Pierre Curie, not Marie. Pierre was killed in an accident in 1906. But it was Marie who ended up defining the unit.
Excerpted from the Oak Ridge Associated Universities Museum of Radiation and Radioactivity article, “How the Curie Came to Be” (https://www.orau.org/health-physics-museum/articles/how-the-curie-came-to-be.html):
“On the opening day [September 13, 1910] of the International Congress, Rutherford’s plans were set in motion by a German physicist ‘unconnected’ with the Committee, Eduard Riecke. Translating from the Congress Proceedings: ‘Professor Riecke (Gottingen) proposed that the name ‘curie’ be given to a radiometric unit’ and ‘Madam Curie (Paris) accepted the proposal of Mr. Riecke, for the honor rendered the memory of Pierre Curie.’
“The following day, the Radium Standards Committee met for the first time. Despite Marie’s desire that the curie be based on one gram of radium, it was decided that the curie should be the amount of radon in equilibrium with 10^-8 grams of radium (Boltwood in a letter to N. Ernest Dorsey, 20 January 1921). But as Boltwood complained later: ‘Madame Curie was a member of the committee and agreed in this decision [regarding the 10^-8 figure] BUT – at an unearthly hour the next morning, she arrived at the hotel where Rutherford and I were stopping and informed us that after thinking the matter over she felt that the use of the name “curie” for so infinitesimally] small [a] quantity of anything was altogether inappropriate.’
“The Committee’s report had to be presented at the very next session of the Congress. There was no choice. Marie Curie got her way.”
The Curie is currently defined as 3.7 × 10^10 disintegrations per second = 37 gigabequerels (GBq).