Obsessive Genius: The Inner World of Marie Curie by Barbara Goldsmith

This biography is about Polish-born French scientist Marie Curie, also well-known to us as ‘Madame Curie’. As is well known, she discovered two new radioactive substances, named polonium and radium, physically, and isolated pure radium chemically. With these achievements, she won two Nobel Prizes for physics and chemistry, respectively. Her husband Pierre Curie, her daughter Irene Joliot-Curie, and her son-in-law Frederic Joliot-Curie were also exceptional scientists and each won Nobel Prizes. As a Korean, the fact that one family won five Nobel Prizes for science doesn’t seem realistic at all. What a great family!

Besides her scientific achievement, this book deals with private and humane sides of her life: Her love life, scandal with Paul Langevin (both a physicist and a brilliant mathematician), competition with other leading scientists of her time, and her illnesses (recurrent depression, tuberculosis, and aplastic pernicious anemia which was her cause of death). However, after I learned all such humane aspects, I became to respect her even more. She seems to be a great scientist and be much ahead of her time. In this book, one picture taken at the Solvay Conference, 1911, shows her greatness, as Marie Curie was only female with twenty-three male scientists including Poincaré, Rutherford, Einstein, etc. in this photograph. (it looks like many great scientific discoveries were made in her time, the late 19th and early 20th centuries.)

How could she achieve such things even as a woman and a mother of two daughters? In those days, almost every woman was expected to be dedicated to her own family, that is, to assist her husband and to raise children. Even today, maintaining a balance between career and family life is difficult for every woman. Madame Curie was very successful in both fields over a hundred years ago, and she even served her country with her daughter Irene when World War I broke out. As a scientist, she was obsessed with isolating pure radium, and the whole process required her passion and tenacity. At the time, the danger of exposure to radioactive substances was not well-known, and Marie Curie had a strong belief that great scientific discoveries demanded sacrifice. She handled polonium and radium with naked hands and transferred these substances by sucking up a pipette! It is said that it was something of a miracle that she lived to 67 years old.

I think her life is something of a miracle in her age.

Written by Shim G.