(Source: http://www.bbc.co.uk/podcasts/series/essay essay_20130118-0800a.mp3)
This is a download from the BBC. For more information / radio3
In 1934 Marie Curie, twice-winner of the Nobel Prize, died at the age of 66 from aplastic anemia, caused by constant exposure to the radioactive materials she had so painstakingly discovered. The perversity of being poisoned by __ is indeed a great stimulant to the imagination. Part of Marie Curie's ultimate luminescense appears to derive from her immacurate inpregnation with radium. Bill B__, in his excellent book of short history of nearly everything, mentions that / highly radioactive / sublime / woman / who has so often been seen as a self-sacrificing scientific saint. She passed like a stranger across her life, intact, natural and very nearly unaware of her astonishing destiny, says Curie's daughter, Eve, in a biography of her mother, published shortly after her death.
At first __ __ image of her as an unworldly martyr of the cause of science. But what it also b__s is a supreme detouchment, a kind of vital arrogance that Eve had to painfully negotiate with throughout her mother's life.
Eve was only two years old when her father met with a road accident and died, thereby depriving Marie Curie of both husband and a scientific companion. The immediate manifestations of Marie's grief, the __ of __, the clenched disbelief became her outward persona. / by her stern convictions about the role of science and society. / The rest of her life was conducted on these terms.
The truth is, / Marie Curie's martirdum was never composed of sweet submission, but instead, all along, of a refusal to accept.
She did not accept, as a child, after watching her elder sister and mother died of infectious disease, that there was a god. She was then Maria S__, the youngest daughter of disposessed Polish aristcrats, were f__ about education. Poland was under Russian dominion, and when her father was barred from / due to / the pain that he suffered confirmed / holy place than the church. /
She did not accept that, despite her extraordinary scholastic achievement, / her education because she was a woman. She and her sister, B..., joined the __ university / underground enterprise / offering / private house in Warsaw. But this was not enough. To escape the circumstances, the sisters formed a practical and loving pact. Marie would work as / governer / make enough money to send / B__ to medical school in Paris. And, after she qualified, B... would / to study the phisical science at Solbonne. Maria's time as a governer / has certain Checovian quality to it, with long afternoons of playing check__s madame __ and / all longing to go back to the city. She set up a school for the children of the peasants and factory workers / paying __ from her meager savings / for their books and stationary / fell violently in love / The family / objected strongly to their union. This was a first experience; passionate love. But she quickly became tired of the young man's inability to stand up to his parents. And, when finally the opportunity arrived to go to Paris, she packed her bags and went.
In Paris, she first lived with her sister / environment for the freezing / most of us picture her. /
Her biographers tend to conquor that these were days when she was truly happy. In the / MGM's bio pic "Madam Curie", we see __ __, the title role, plugging / her roof / tranced by the stars shining through the kind of windows that only Holywood __ __ posess. To romanticise these __s, as MGM certainly did, is to fall once again into the trap of making Curie / self-sacrificing saint rather than recognizing her as a driven, hard-headed, ambitious but strongly principled woman that she really was, equally nurished by, and trapped, within her high-mindedness.
Another time when Curie was happy was when she was stirring pitch b...., a mineral containing radioactive elements, outside a shed that served as a laboratory / her husband Pierre. She was convinced that there must exist within it a substance of much greater radioactivity than the uranium and __um, that had already been identified among its components. It is this theoretical deduction that serves as first evidence of her true intellectual genius. But it was only through / work of purifying its source to prove the existence of the element radium / into recognition as a world-class scientist.
For this, she and Pierre were awarded the Nobel Prize. But they continued to be berigered by money problems. And then, just as things were starting to look more hopeful, Pierre was run over while crossing the road and died.
Marie Curie did not con.... herself to the memory of her husband and live in sexual isolation for the rest of her life. Four years after the death of Pierre Curie, she found herself in a passinate relationship with Paul __, a former student of Pierre's, some years younger than her and married with four children.
Letters that they had exchanged were released to the press by his furious wife, and Marie Curie's reputation was so tarnished that when the second Nobel Prize was awarded to her, the committee begged her to graciously stay away from the ceremony. To this, she replied, "I believe that there is no connection between my scientific work and the facts of my private life. I cannot accept the idea in principle that the appreciation of the value of scientific work should be influenced by libel and slunder concerning private life.
Again, it is high-mindedness that saves her from experiencing, or submitting to, personal shame.
For public redemption, she would have to look to World War I, and her extraordinary / bringing X-ray technology to alter the fates of many young soldiers torn up by bullets that would have been invisible otherwise. Exercising her practical skills, she devised vehicles that could transport and power such life-saving devices to the battle field. These quickly aquired the __ of __ __. She managed to install around 200 X-ray stations at relevant locations, worked tirelessly to service them, and recruited her older daughter, Ireen, hardly out of school, to help with this effort.
This drew them close. And __ in Irene a sense of international social responsibility as well as the secure desire to persue the study of radioactivity which she could see, before her own eyes, was the best kind of magic that could ever exist.
Magic was, in fact, never far from their lives. The image of the Curies creeping into the little shed to discover their radium-impregnated vessels / glow / has obvious Alchemical resonances. Although, to me, / somewhat / reminicent in its combination of the domestic, and slightly supernatral, of the moment in the __ of the shoemaker when the shoemaker comes down and find that the shoes have miraculously swern themselves together.
It appears that the Curies were perfectly open to speculations about the supernatural. Indeed, they may have been more suseptible than others to the notion that unknown sources of energy lay hidden a... the universe After all, it was an unknown souce of energy that they had chased and successfully harnessed, and / knew already / to be capable of transforming our experience of life.
When the Italian spiritualist medium U__ M__ visited Paris in 1905, the Curies were both in the audience, as __ __ __ and several other distinguished scientists and future Nobel lauriates, who were among the Curie's tight circle of friends.
Pierre Curie concluded that the phenomemon that we saw appeared inexplicable / Marie remained ...stic. All this, by way of establishing that their lives were by no means changed __ the scientific rationalizm. Like others of the time, there were part of / huge / fundamental / perception / and their anchor was humanism. It was this which was more steady in their lives than any of their other beliefs / Marie Curie, not just as the woman who conceived the existence of radium, and boiled it out of pitch blend / existence of radium / also as a person who refused to / Even though all of the proceeds could have been put to good use by herself and Pierre in the service of science. Instead they had struggled to obtain public funds to continue their research. When the American journalist M__ M__ raised enough funds from her compatriots to buy Marie Curie a gram of radium, she insisted that / her institute / She never wavered from the belief that personal wealth, even when directed at noble causes, was a __ commodity.
Radium could indeed have made them rich. It became a much valued ingreadient of cosmetics. And / was advocated for __ __ __ as early as 1904. An English __ of radium hand cleaner dating from about 1910 states / takes off everything but the skin. An American dancer by the name of ... ... came to perform in the Curie's living room, in the hope of / of the substance. Radium-based luminecent paint was used on watch dials and instrument panels, as well as theater seat numbers, and eyes for, probably very scary, dolls. The precision of such tasks required the brushes to be tightly shaped. In a certain factory in New Jersey, the workers figured that the best way to do this was by twirling / on their lips / a few lines / poem / the innocense of radium which beautifully captures their plight. Over the years / grow dull / the doctors gave up, removed / half her jaw and blamed / syphillis when her thigh bone snapped. / she / pronounced / The innocense of Radium, a kind radience that could not be held by the body of a woman / only caught between her teeth.
According to a New York Times article from 1987, some victims ingested so much radium that their graves still caused geiger counter needls to jump.
Both Marie and her daughter Irene would succumb to the negative effect of radioactivity, with Irene, / Nobel __ / in the same field, also dying / age of 58 from leukemia.
Many aspects / life / extremel hardships she suffered __ __ __ fumes of radioactivity, that eventually took her to her grave, fit perfectly with the conventions of martyrdum. In my opinion, however, what really elevates her life to the status of tragedy, is that she walked through it like a stranger. In many respects, she is like the highly __, creative and difficult heroins of some of H__ B__'s plays. I think the self-sacrificing image that we have of her has been a product of a need to reconcile Curie the commited scientist with Curie the wife and mother. Issues that in many ways remain unresolved.
But the clue to Maria Curie's success does not lie in an angelic disposition. It was her tanacity and pride that took her through, and granted her relationships of dignity and equality with her male coleagues and, importantly, with her husband.
Indeed, what I __ remember from / book on / as a schoolgirl / from the British Council library in Calcatta, and breathlessly consumed, is neither her dedication to scitence, nor her grim determination to make the world a better place. What ... / undoubtedly fictionalized image of her and Pierre in the countryside just before he died, watching their daughters playing and gathering flowers / When he turns to her and says, "Life has been sweet with you, Marie."