Geekery

Marie Curie 1857 – 1934

Posted on 04. Mar, 2009 by Jake in Geek God

In 2005, one of the finest economic minds of his generation was forced to resign as head of one the world’s great universities.

Larry Summers, who has just been made Barack Obama’s chief economics wonk, had to step down as Harvard president after suggesting that the reason there are so few women in engineering might be because actually they’re no good at it.

Ok, it was more subtle than that. He was speaking off the cuff, he was trying to provoke a debate, and what he actually suggested was something he called “different availability of aptitude at the high end.” Basically: men are, statistically, either real schmucks or super smart. The smart ones become scientists. The rest sit around drinking beer and writing blog posts.

It’s a subtle point, because you need more than one or two really smart women to show that it’s wrong. But it’s a start.

Take Marie Curie, for example. The only person awarded Nobel prizes for two different branches of science, she coined the term ‘radioactivity’.

Nuclear power is the quintessential scientific concept of the 20th century. When we think about it, grand men like Einstein and Robert Oppenheimer come to mind – and the destructive forces they wrought: The Manhattan Project, Hiroshima, Chernobyl.

Curie was no less of a path-breaker. She did innovative research with poor resources, she was the first woman professor of general sciences at her university, she even isolated radium.

But her passion for radiation’s power lay in its ability to heal. During World War One, she insisted on the widespread use of portable radiography machine to treat injured soldiers. (She was so that the machines became known as ‘petites Curies’.) And through her research, powerful cancer treatments could be developed.

And although she had moved to France, she never forgot her native Poland. In 1932 she founded a laboratory for studying radium in Warsaw, headed by her sister.

Curie’s dedication to the uplifting effects of science is easy to idealise. But her modesty, insight and accomplishment are such an impressive example that we need to ask ourselves if the lack of women scientists is just a statistical quirk – or society’s great loss.

It is a cruel irony that Curie’s life passion ultimately killed her. She died in 1934, almost certainly the result of exposure to radioactive materials.

Here is a link to the speech for the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1903

Tags: marie curie, profile