Science: Death of Mme Curie

The year was 1898; the month, December; the place, Paris. A woman with blue eyes and blonde hair, and a dark, bearded man worked in taut silence in a place described as a ”cross between a horse stable and a potato cellar.” The walls were of rough planks; the glass roof, patched in places, leaked when it rained. There were three battered deal tables covered with apparatus, a few chairs, a pot-bellied stove. On the asphalt floor lay coarse mats.

Suddenly the woman turned off the gas lights. The darkness was complete except for the faint luminescence of something in a tube which she held in her hand. Few days later Marie Sklodowska Curie and her husband Pierre announced they had discovered a radioactive element which they called radium.

The President of France, the entire French Cabinet, the president of the University of Paris and scientists of three continents gathered in a lecture hall at the Sorbonne. The year was 1908. Two years before Marie Curie’s husband, absorbed in his dreams, had been killed by a truck. Marie Curie had been appointed to the chair of physics which he had held, first woman to hold a Sorbonne professorship. This was the occasion of her first lecture. She appeared in a plain black working dress. She bowed politely, waited for the applause to stop, turned to her class sitting in a group. “Pierre Curie has prepared the following lesson for you,” she said, and from a notebook began to read the lecture her husband had not delivered.

Last week a frail and broken woman lay in a remote sanatorium in the French Alps under the shadow of Mt. Blanc. A racking cough had settled in her chest. Pernicious anemia was in her blood. Perhaps long exposure to the deadly element she and her husband had discovered was taking its toll. But Marie Curie’s mind was clear and she was ready to die. She had come far since her birth in Poland 66 years ago. In Warsaw her father had been a physics professor, her mother principal of a girls’ school. Their daughter Marie had to flee to France because Russian officials frowned on her efforts to stimulate interest in the Polish language. While studying in Paris she lived in a bare garret, ate meals that cost half a franc a day, met a brooding, handsome young physics instructor whom she twitted for expressing astonishment at her learning, and then married. Becquerel’s accidental discovery of radioactivity of uranium compounds in 1896 excited them greatly. They obtained a ton of pitchblende from the Austrian Government, began a long series of crushings, pulverizations, leachings, precipitations, crystallizations with apparatus at which a modern physicist would sneer. Much of the time Mme Curie spent stirring a cauldron with an iron rod as thick as one of her thin arms. At last they had a thimbleful of a white salt. In it they found first polonium, finally radium.

Possibly Mme Curie thought of the years of her work alone, of how she established the atomic nature of radioactivity, of how she isolated pure radium from the chloride, of her work on cancer therapy, of her Wartime labors in military hospitals. Possibly she thought of her last years, passed mainly in managing the Institut du Radium’s Curie Laboratory which she founded in 1912. lecturing at the Sorbonne, writing treatises and books. Then there were the honors which had been showered on her as on no other woman of her time—the Nobel Prize awarded to her, her husband and Becquerel in 1903, to her alone in 1911; the gram of radium presented to her by President Harding in 1921 in behalf of U. S. admirers; the $50,000 given her by President Hoover in 1929. But modest Mme Curie always turned away from such honors, such gifts. At her bedside last week were her daughters—Eve, the musician, Irene the scientist who worked with her husband in better quarters but in much the same spirit as Pierre and Marie Curie a generation before them. Mme Curie had lived long enough to see Irene honored as co-discoverer of a phenomenon that excited physicists the world over, artificial radio-activity (TIME, Feb. 12).

The sanatorium lights shone brightly in the summer dusk. Marie Curie lapsedinto coma. Next morning at daybreak she died. Her body was taken to Paris. In a crypt 20 miles from Paris, her remains were placed beside those of her husband. Only witnesses were her daughters, son-in-law, a handful of intimate associates. One by one, in silence, they filed past the casket and each laid on it a rose. The world Press rang with acclaim for the greatest woman scientist in history.