Radioactive: Marie & Pierre Curie: A Tale of Love and Fallout

"This is the book my daughter gave me as a birthday present a few years ago. She’s trying to get me more into graphic novels and this is just a gorgeously illustrated book. It begins with a line, “With apologies to Marie Curie, who said, ‘There is no connection between my scientific work and the facts of my private life.’” This book is predicated on the idea that that’s absolutely false. It’s a wonderful look both biographically and artistically and scientifically at Marie and Pierre Curie, although Pierre dies about halfway through the book because he was run over by a horse carriage and killed. It talks at length about Marie Curie’s affair, after Pierre’s death, with Pierre’s student Paul Langevin and the impact that had. You can imagine in the early 20th century it wasn’t easy. The book really does blend the scientific and the personal very, very beautifully. I’m not entirely in agreement with a few things it says. It comes out quite anti-nuclear power and makes a few other comments that I don’t entirely agree with. But it is just a wonderful book and the technique that was used to make the illustrations is fascinating. It’s just beautiful. It’s graphic nonfiction. It’s not exactly comic book style, but my daughter says it’s graphic nonfiction. It’s also about the Curies’ daughter, Irène Joliot-Curie, who also went on to be a Nobel laureate. She and her husband won the Nobel Prize for the creation of artificial radioactive elements in the 1930s. Both Marie and her daughter died of radiation-induced diseases, eventually, because people didn’t know about the dangers of radiation as much as we do now. They gradually figured it out over the early part of the 20th century. But by the time these people died, they had accumulated enough radiation to be problematic. There’s a famous story about the young women who painted the radium on the dials of luminous watches in the 1920s. They would lick the brushes to get them nice and fine. And many of them died of radiation-induced leukemia. It took a while to understand the dangers of radiation. And now I would say we probably over-understand them, in a way. Well, they’re associated with France , because they did their work in Paris. But Marie was from Poland. And that’s why polonium, the agent that is now used by the Russians as a radioactive poison, is named after Poland. Marie and Pierre were so intertwined in their laboratory work, that it’s a little bit difficult to separate their contributions. Yes, though I would say there are other scientists and particularly other women, who ought to be on a level with Marie Curie who are not nearly known as widely as they should be. One is Lise Meitner, whose biography I might have included in this set of books but didn’t. She’s arguably the discoverer of nuclear fission and wrote the first paper to use that term. She was shafted by her former collaborator who remained in Germany after she fled and he won the Nobel Prize for their work. I could go on, but that’s a different topic."