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Show FOCUS: THE CENTURIUM C U R I .E (co11tinued from page 8) which intimate friends easily noticed. Marie's life fell apart on April 19, 1906. Pierre was killed that afternoon while crossing a busy Paris street. His head was crushed by the rear wheel of a heavy horse-drawn cart after h e slipped and fell on the wet cobblestone street. Marie never fully recovered from the incident. The French government offered a national pension in the Curie name, but Marie turned it down. She could, she said, talce care of herself and her two daughters by her work. She did, however, accept Pierre's chair in physics at the Sorbonne. In receiving Pierre's chair, Marie became the first woman faculty member in French higher education. The award had been made by the faculty of science at the Sorbonne. On the day of her inaugural lecture, she resumed Pierre's course at the point where Pierre had left it, reviewing the progress of the understanding of the structure of matter since the beginning of the nineteenth century. A few months after Pierre's death, Marie's work was questioned by the dean of British scientists, Lord Kelvin, who, though he was kind to Marie in person, was not above challenging her conclusion that radium was an element. Ignoring the scientific journals available to him, Kelvin revealed his skepticism in the columns of the London Times. It had been discovered by a couple of British scientists that radium spontaneously gives off the enert gas helium, helping to explain the disintegration process of radioactive substances. Kelvin pointed out that lead is one of the disintegration products of radium, and that radium was, rather than a new element, a molecular compound of lead and five helium atoms. Marie Curie was naturally chagrined by the firestorm that followed Kelvin's theory. Her whole career was at stake, not to mention the basis of, the discovery for which she was awarded a Nobel Prize-that radioactivity is an atomic property of the element radium. She went to work in her meticulous way to corroborate her theory. In 1907 she produced four decigrams of what she considered "perfectly pure radium chloride, " which enabled her to determine a more precise atomic weight. ext, she tackled the question of whether polonium, her first discovery, was a metal. The problem for Marie was that there was 5,000 times less plutonium in pitchblende ore than there was radium. A ton of the ore contained only a few thousandths of a gram of polonium. After much exacting work, she was able to obtain a sample of polonium salt which was 50 times more radioactive than the same amount of radium salt. I it suited her." But all this had not prevented her from becoming one of the most respected women in Europe. Even so, when she was offered the Legion of Honor that year, she refused to accept it. But it was not until 1910, four years after Kelvin's broadside, that she was able to distill enough radium salt to a shiny white solid, proving what she had said radium was, a metal, and an element. She had even determined its boilµig point to be about 700 degrees centigrade. By now Marie was an acknowledged leader of the scientific world. Her influence was enormous and her collaboration with her husband largely forgotten. Setting the International Standard for radium suddenly became of paramount importance, because hospitals were using radium in the treatment of cancer, and knowing what dosage to use meant knowing what a dose was. She insisted that she be the one to establish the standard. Her Treatise on Radioactivity, which ran to nearly a thousand pages, was a summary of the work done in radioactivity. Some of the researchers on the subject believed that while she spent much time crediting the work of other scientists in other countries, she set too much importance on the priority of the work of French scientists, if not on the work of herself and Pierre. Since her husband's death, Marie had, through her own efforts, become the most widely recognized scientist in France. Her work was meticulous and focused, and her fellow scientists eagerly looked forward to h er publications. But it would be a mistake to view Marie Curie's life simply as that of a woman reaching the pinnacle of success in a man's world as a result of her brilliant mind and hard work. Though not treated in summaries of her life and work, and even in more extended accounts, there existed those occasions that stretched her to her physical and mental limits. The year 1910 was not a particularly good year for Marie. While only in her early 40s, she suffered from a variety of illnesses. She was considered by some to be a hypochondriac, chiefly because of her inclination to use her poor health as an excuse for missing social appointments, even at professional conferences. Her attacks of nervous exhaustion, it was said, came "when ut if 1910 was a bad year, 1911 was worse. It was, undoubtedly, the worst year of her life. Marie herself had published numerous articles and several books, but when she applied for an opening in the Academy of Sciences-to which a woman had never been elected-she failed to gain admittance by a single vote. Her interest in gaining membership seemed strange to some, owing to her bitterness over the rejection that Pierre experienced upon his application for membership in the Academy, and her disgust with the whole electoral process. But she reasoned that membership would be good for her laboratory and the work she was trying to accomplish there. But far more serious problems lay ahead for her. She was accused by the press of having an affair with a married man, the father of four children. The man, Paul Langevin, was a famous and respected scientist and a former pupil of Pierre Curie. Langevin had a reputation for being a top-rate physicist who had made important contributions to the understanding of magnetism. He had arrived independently at the same conclusions regarding the relationship between mass and energy as Einstein, and by 1914 he was aware of the implications of the special theory of relativity. Langevin's marriage, however, was in a shambles, and it was affecting his work. He often confided to a mutual friend of his and Marie's that he could not go on. Marie and her confidante, the daughter of the dean of the faculty of science at the Sorbonne, seemed to feel that Paul was too important to be lost to science, and both women offered him encouragement and comfort. But of all the notable women in Europe during the early years of the twentieth century, Marie Curie seemed the least likely candidate for such a charge leveled against h er. From all that is known of her, she had not the inclination, the health, nor the time for such conduct. The evidence for the change was reported with all the tastelessness and salaciousness that the French press, which had recently discovered the meaning of "yellow journalism," could supply, with references to Langevin as "a cad and a scoundrel" and Marie as "the vestal virgin of radium." Letters between them had been discovered and printed in a Paris newspaper, and soon reports of the alleged affair were being telegraphed to major cities around the world. It has been pointed out that there was nothing in the so-called affair that could be said to be unquestion- (continued oa page 10) |