By JUDE DOUGHERTY
Wirtén, Eva Hemmungs. Making Marie Curie: Intellectual Property and Celebrity Culture in Our Age of Information. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2015; 223 pp.
The basic facts concerning the lives of Pierre and Marie Curie are well known. Marya Sklowdowska, born in 1867, arrived in Paris in 1889 to study physics at the Sorbonne. A grant subsequently awarded enabled her to study the magnetic properties of steel. At the university she met Pierre, who was at that time working on his doctorate.
Married to Pierre in July 1893, she would continue her research on steel, but two things occurred that directed her attention elsewhere. One was Wilhelm Röntgen’s discovery of what he called “x-rays.” The other was the experience of Henri Becquerel, who had forgotten a packet of uranium salts which he left in a drawer. Upon returning for them, he found that they had emitted an unknown radiation on a photographic plate also in the drawer.
Becquerel was eventually to publish seven papers on the subject, but Marie Curie’s curiosity was immediately aroused. Devoting her attention to the mineral, pitchblende, uraninite ore, she reasoned that its emission of rays could be explained only by the presence in the ore of an unknown substance or substances.
Joined by her husband, Pierre, she undertook to resolve the question. Using sophisticated techniques, by measuring the action of the rays given off on magnetic fields, the Curies proved the existence of varying amounts of three types of particles — electrically positive, negative, and neutral ones — particles that Sir Ernest Rutherford later called alpha, beta, and gamma rays. The varying amounts of the particles, it was eventually determined, were caused by the radioactivity of radium and thorium. The term “radioactive” was first introduced by Marie in 1898.
The investigative techniques of the Curies, in the same year, led them to deduce the existence of two previously unknown elements, later called polonium (in honor of Marie’s home country) and radium.
Their accomplishments led the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences to award the Curies, jointly with Henri Becquerel, the Nobel Prize in physics for 1903. Catapulted to fame by the Nobel award, the Curies refused to capitalize on their notoriety. They publicly disavowed patenting their discoveries and techniques for identifying radioactive isotopes and spurned commercialization of any kind in the interest of making the results of their work available to all.
Pierre unfortunately was to suffer an early death in 1906, as result of an automobile accident. Marie continued their work and was awarded in 1911 a second Nobel Prize for her achievement in chemistry. She made two remarkable trips to the United States in 1920-1921 and 1929. The first was to receive a gift from the Women of America, in the amount of $100,000, for the purchase of one gram of radium. On both trips she was honored by many universities, and on the second visit, like the first, she received considerable monetary support for her Radium Institute.
She would accept no gift for her person, and even after Pierre’s death, she refused a pension offered by the French government. Her work with radioactive materials eventually took its toll on her health. She died at age 66 in 1934.
With several biographies available, why this one? Eva Wirtén’s motivation is complex. She acknowledges that from her earliest years as a celebrity, Curie’s life was well documented and transmitted to a rapt audience. Over a period of three decades there were discoveries, duels, gifts, jubilees, and deaths, all well-reported at the time.
But the public image of Marie Curie Wirtén finds troubling, insofar as she comes to us largely as a result of an adoring biography written by her daughter, Eva. How did that happen?
In September 1937, the Saturday Evening Post began an eight-part serialization of Eva’s biography. Entitled Marie Curie, it won the National Book Award of that year and was immediately translated into many languages. Bordering on the hagiographic, its account became the lens through which the Curies were known and venerated worldwide.
Although three major biographies have been published since Eva’s account, Wirtén thinks there is more to be told. In Wirtén’s view, Curie was no saint and does not deserve the pedestal on which she is often put. She was far more earthy. She probably engaged in an alleged extramarital affair with Paul Langevin, a coworker and fellow Nobel laureate. Five men were to engage in a duel d’honneur on her behalf. And perhaps most damning of all, from Wirtén’s perspective, is that she worked tirelessly to promote her romanticized image, albeit on behalf of her laboratory.
The great merit of Making Marie Curie is the author’s account of Curie’s 12-year participation on the Commission International de Coopération Intellectuelle (CICI), which was established to draw up a universal code to protect intellectual property and bibliographical materials. The rights of intellectuals in the creative process, and not merely the application of ideas, was an early focus of the commission.
Curie, Einstein, the physicist Robert Millikan, and the historian Gilbert Murray were among the members of the small committee at its founding. Its work was to bear fruit. Today UNESCO administers the Universal Copyright Convention, and the World Trade Organization administers an agreement on trade-related aspects of intellectual property rights.
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(Dr. Dougherty is dean emeritus of The School of Philosophy of The Catholic University of America.)
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